Fifty years ago, three astronauts died on the launch pad in a ground test. It occurs to me that, like the Kennedy assassination, this was one more event that, had it not occurred, the moon landings may not have been successful. There were many problems with the program that weren’t seriously dealt with until after that disaster. It reinforces the reality of how unlikely the success of Apollo was, and why it’s foolish to think we can replicate it half a century later.
Meanwhile, Commercial Crew is delayed again. Because it’s more important to not lose an astronaut than to end our dependence on the Russians, even though at this point, we should have no confidence in their systems. While crew flights use Soyuz, not Proton, they both use the third stage that just failed on the Progress mission. And they seem to have systemic problems in their aerospace industry.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a piece from the WaPo.
[Update a while later]
Andrew Chaiken asks, did it have to happen? They were being very sloppy. They hadn’t had any problems with pure O2 in Mercury or Gemini, so they ignored the issue. I’d forgotten the name Marty Cioffoletti; he went on to work on the Shuttle, and I worked with him occasionally in Downey in the 80s.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a useful bottom line, that I’ve been thinking about this week, in the context of the book:
A month after the fire, NASA’s director of manned spaceflight, George Mueller, said in a Congressional hearing that NASA’s experiences with Mercury and Gemini “had demonstrated that the possibility of a fire in the spacecraft cabin was remote.” Mueller’s words lay bare the false logic that, in the pressure to meet President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for a lunar landing, had skewed the thinking of nearly everyone at NASA: It hasn’t bitten us, so we must be okay. This fallacy would strike NASA again, with the O-ring leaks that brought down the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the broken-off chunk of foam insulation that doomed its sister ship Columbia in 2003.
It’s nice to think that if we only spend enough money, and take enough time, we can ensure that no one ever dies, but as I write in the book:
No frontier in history has ever been opened without risk and the loss of human life, and the space frontier will be no different, particularly considering the harshness and hazards of it. That we spend untold billions in a futile attempt to prevent such risk is both a barrier to opening it, and a testament to the lack of national importance in doing so.
Those men died because we were in a rush, because what we were doing — beating the Soviets to the moon — was at the time considered important. But now, “safety is the highest priority.”
[Update a while later]
There are a lot of 50th anniversaries of Apollo this decade (e.g., first landing in July, 2019), but today's is the most tragic.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) January 27, 2017
[Mid-morning update]
OK, I had forgotten that the Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the same day. It didn’t get as many headlines.
What will happen when -a statistically likely event-we lose lives in a Soyuz launch?
Not sure it is statistically likely. I hope we’ll stop using them before that happens. A more significant question is what happens when we lose lives on a commercial vehicle?
Yes. The private-spaceflight industry leaves me somewhat cold partly for this reason, i.e. insurance costs & liability issues. A major accident -besides being a disaster for those involved directly- would result in a huge setback for the industry.
In addition, I have concerns about an industry that thus far depends mostly (entirely?) on government contracts, notably to supply a research project (ISS) of dubious value. I have yet to see a proposal that offers a genuinely profitable achievement for a private space venture. Asteroid mining proposals, despite their grandiose promise, don’t yet seem to offer any clear c/b analysis. Mostly I see ‘ham-sandwich’ arguments, like the one that promises glorious profits for Lunar He3 mining, that depend upon currently non-existent practical applications for He3. What little optimism I have is for cheaper forms of old (rocket) technology. But reducing costs is not the same as turning a profit.
In unrelated sort-of-space-news, a group at Harvard claims (others are dubious) to have produced metallic hydrogen by putting it under absurd pressures . The really interesting bit is that many theories say this would maintain its state under considerably higher pressure, once established; the energy density of such a fuel, if it could be produced in quantity, would likely be a dramatic improvement over other chemical fuels.
(would maintain state under *lower* pressure once established, that is).
Previous attempts failed due to only placing the hydrogen under ludicrous pressure.
Isn’t this rather like making and using diamonds as rocket fuel?
…and formed under a absurd pressure above the previous experiments under ludicrous pressure, the resulting metallic hydrogen changes from plaid to paisley in appearance….
Boeing, as previously reported, is having difficulties with mass and aeroacoustic issues. Martin also revealed that SpaceX’s technical issues have resulted from a change in capsule design to enable a water-based, rather than ground-based, landing and related concerns about the capsule taking on excessive water. Further delays, Martin says, are also possible.
It shouldn’t take years to fix these problems.
I think the major issue that delayed the SpaceX commercial crew was actually two things. The funding cuts of Congress to Commercial Crew (1-2 years), and the Falcon 9 FT launch failure (6 months). Now there is talk they might not allow SpaceX to fuel the rocket after the astronauts ingress into the Dragon. If they add an access tower to the launch requirements that’s also going to require changes to the pad which may take quite a while to be done.
SpaceX should have foreseen this one coming though. I remember the tower being discussed as a requirement back when the EELVs were proposed to be used for crew.
As for the Soyuz, the Russians supposedly figured out the real reason so there’s no reason to think they won’t fix it and there should be a Progress launch before the next Soyuz launch to test it. Still I agree there needs to be launcher redundancy I always thought you needed at least 3 launch provides to make sure the ISS will have manned transportation. There’s a chance they won’t be able to fix the issues quickly.
The major issue that has delayed SpaceX commercial crew is the switch from a minimally modified Cargo Dragon to Dragon 2.
There’s that too, I guess, but given the NASA’s requirement for a launch escape system they had to make the changes.
Rand, every year right around your birthday we have these anniversaries: Apollo 1, Columbia, Challenger. There are people who voted in November who are too young to remember Columbia firsthand.
These incidents have now passed into history, and the lessons still haven’t been learned and will have to be learned again. In particular, the primary lesson.
Farmers die on the job. Soldiers die on the job. Firefighters die on the job. Fishermen die on the job. Miners die on the job. Police die on the job. Construction workers die on the job. Truckers die on the job. Pilots die on the job.
And as more and more astronauts go into space, more astronauts will die on the job. Eventually every day of the year will be the anniversary of the death of an astronaut on the job.
So the next time it does happen, whether next year or next decade, let’s please treat it like any other on-the-job fatality and not shut down all manned space activity for two years at a time.
let’s please treat it like any other on-the-job fatality and not shut down all manned space activity for two years at a time.
What will prevent all space activity from being shut down is the availability of more than one means of transport.
Chaikin’s article was very good.
The fire’s root cause lay in what cognitive scientists call perceptual blindness, in which even very smart people, sure that they are paying attention, can miss what is right in front of them.
When I read that, I couldn’t help thinking about the Progressive philosophy that ordinary people are too stupid and ignorant to run their own lives, but must be ruled from the top down by people who are smarter and highly educated.