STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)
waynehale.wordpress.com
waynehale.wordpress.com
> STS-93 carried the heaviest payload the shuttle ever launched; the Chandra X-ray observatory (formerly known as the Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facility or AXAF) and it IUS booster.
Again, if my memory serves, Columbia's internal airlock however is what made it unable to dock with the ISS. It was the only shuttle that retained that configuration. It's also part of the reason it was heavier, along with it being the initial airframe and built heavier than the subsequent ones.
Very minor nitpick, but the first airframe (spaceframe?) is OV-101 Enterprise. OV-102 Columbia is the second.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_orbiter#Orbiter_...
OV-099 as a number actually doesn't make sense, because the numbering scheme (OV-XYY) in full reads: Orbiter Vehicle, Series X, Vehicle YY.
Series 1 is the original (and only) line of flightworthy Space Shuttle Orbiters including Enterprise, Vehicle number is given in sequence within a series starting from 01.
So OV-101 (Enterprise's) reads Orbiter Vehicle, Series 1, Vehicle 01. OV-102 (Columbia's) reads likewise Vehicle 02, and so on.
OV-099 (Challenger's) reads Orbiter Vehicle, Series 0, Vehicle 99 which makes absolutely no sense.
In contrast a spacecraft like the shuttle, faces much harsher conditions and, as not many of these were built, I expect more manual procedures and tinkering while building the thing.
In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often.
Today's extremely reliable airliners got that way on a long, long string of accidents and near accidents.
The average age of an astronaut is 34 [2], and most are male, so a look at an actuarial table [3] tells us that going to space is approximately as likely to kill you as literally every risk an ordinary person would take in their life up to that point (at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died, and a large proportion of those deaths are due [4] to accidental injury).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifica...
[3] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/
I think what you are saying is that 34 years after being born 4.3% of male individuals are dead.
In my understanding if someone dies when they are 10 years old they will never be "34 years of age". This probably feels nitpicky but it has thrown me into a loop of trying to understand what you are saying.
(Not even mentioning that I read the table you linked as 4.2% not 4.3%)
And you did mention it, by saying you weren't mentioning it.
As I said it wasn’t clear to me. The two meaning which was fighting in my mind were the one i wrote and that the percentage is the probability of a male dying in their 34th year of life. Had to consult with the table to figure out which one they mean.
> And you did mention it, by saying you weren't mentioning it.
Well spotted. Exactly because the discrepancy troubles me. It either means that I don’t understand how to read or what to read in the table (in which case I would love to be corrected) or that the commenter made a typo (which doesn’t matter at all). If i were certain it is a typo I wouldn’t mention it. But since I can’t be certain that the error is not “in my equipment” i shared the observation hoping to get clarification.
But 14 of those were caused by the shuttle alone. All the others were over 50 years ago. So far, all the spacecrafts still in use today have had a pretty good track record.
The shuttle also carried over half of all astronauts (355) on orbital missions, so if you’re excluding the shuttle it’s not that much safer.
Soyuz MS is a refined design, but Soyusz 11 killed 3 people and Soyuz 1 killed 1. Calling it a different design isn’t unreasonable but by that token it would be limited to 22 successful crewed missions and 1 in progress.
The shuttle's lack of a launch abort mechanism is something NASA wouldn't accept in any modern human-rated spacecraft. But arguably the deadliest feature of the shuttle was that it was pushed as the single launch platform for all launches, even those that didn't require any crew. Putting crew on every single flight made many missions more risky than they had to be
Do you mean Annapurna? It, at one point had a death rate above 30%, but is now below 20%. K2 has taken over the crown for deadliest mountain with a death rate of 24%
??? Aconcagua doesn't have an especially high fatality rate.
If one space agency built a rocket which always immediately exploded after launch, and another space agency built one which always worked, you could say the odds of failure for the next astronaut was 50%. But of course the two rockets are essentially unrelated. The chance of success of each rocket is a function of design, engineering process, organisational culture of that organisation.
Telling the astronaut strapped to the top of the explody rocket that there's a 50% chance of exploding is actually less help than no estimate. Because actually there's a 100% chance of them exploding. An estimate is only as valuable as the assumptions that drive it.
But when that many people die, in that many separate incidents, across a variety of nations & launch vehicles - then the "The risk of spaceflight is still very high" thesis is statistically solid.
Skimming your reference [1], I see 11 more who died in accidents during testing & training. Including the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 fire on the launch pad (during a launch rehearsal test).
Until spaceflight is "buy your ticket, show up, get in your seat, wait, exit at your destination", I'd argue that we should include the testing & training risks in the risk of human spaceflight.
In order to get funding from the miltary, the shuttle had to be able to switch to a polar orbit which is why it had those stupidly large engines that serve no purpose otherwise.
If you get rid of that, you actually can design a reusable space plane.
- material used to make a bolt
- what the torque used to tighten the bolt was
- who tightened the blot
- when it was tightened
- etc
This allows them trace back through the history of each vehicle for debugging purposes.
They also applied this to the Space Shuttle software. This article from 1996 does an amazing job of describing the process: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
It's interesting how modern some of the practices described are. Plus, some of the practices (E.g. the bug rate model), from my experience, only existed there.
> It's interesting how modern some of the practices described are.
(One of the things you have to watch out for is that if the torque on a nut drops for no reason, it may be a hairline crack in the bolt it's attached to)
I think two catastrophic space shuttle failures is more than enough :-/
You also have some parts that are destined for QA purposes, and those have a tagging system that is meant to prevent them from being recycled onto a real aircraft once they've been used for stress testing.
Everyone prepares for complete engine failure, but no one expects and electrical fire in the office
To have several "balancing" failures occur at the same time would be so unlikely as to be ascribed to some synchronicity rather than real life.
The pin caused two problems. First, the LOX itself was dangerous because if it had been released incorrectly, it could have caused an explosion. That, fortunately, did not happen. And second, the ejected pin severed several hydrogen pipes being used to cool the nozzle. I assume the cooling is to keep it from melting under the extreme temperatures of the launch - the article mentions "burn through", which I'm guessing is "the nozzle material melts and your rocket exhaust goes off in a random direction so you Will Not Go To Space Today". It severed three pipes; fortunately the shuttle was designed such that it could tolerate the failure of up to four, and the nozzle held.
Wiki has a picture at [1] - the hydrogen leak from the severed pipes is in the engine on the right of the image, creating a white streak on the side of the nozzle and distorting the shape of the exhaust.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:STS-93_SSME_Hydrogen...
Ironic really, that a leak prevention patch job ended up causing a different leak.
If every vehicle is patched and it is part of normal manufacturing, then you could say that none of them are patched.
This is only true if they are all patched in exactly the same way and if you patch existing examples in the field.
In the real world patches are applied as repairs to incidents that are unique to each example. Airliners are too expensive to throw away because of minor flaws and damage.
Yep, rocket nozzles and combustion chambers must be cooled down while they work. This is usually done by passing the fuel through their outer walls before it burns.
This Scott Manley video has a terrific explanation:
Is that feet per second?
eg: Climbing 1500 feet per minute.
________
> "How lucky we were," Hale said. "Instead of being 200 or more [ft/s] short at [the time of Main Engine Cut-Off], possibly leading to an abort landing or requiring two tons of [Orbital Maneuvering System] propellant to make up, we wound up being only 15 [ft/s] short, well within the capability of the [Orbital Maneuvering System] budget."
Makes STS-1 even more impressive. Huge respect for John Young and Bob Crippen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Crewed
Maybe describe Young as having been to space on 3 successive generations of US space vehicles?
Here's an article about it by the same author:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spysat-and...
The atmosphere is unpredictable. The ecosystem is teeming with life and a lot of it is animals with their own agency.
Then there’s the whole human factor. If you’re making a vehicle that operates on Earth, you have to be prepared for drunk people and terrorists and all sorts of human contingencies. They’re not causing havoc in deep space.
For better and worse, space is dead.
And on the other-other hand, the things that go wrong in spaceflight usually go wrong on launch or reentry - the parts where you combine the extreme conditions of space with the unpredictable extra nonsense of Earth. Like, say, a cold morning making an O-ring brittle or aerodynamic stresses ripping you apart on reentry. Only three deaths - the crew of Soyuz 11 [2] - have actually occurred in space proper; all other deaths have occurred within the Earth's atmosphere. (Although Apollo 13 came close to adding to that list.)
[1] LEO orbital velocity is ~8 km/s, mach 1 is ~300 m/s, although meteoroids necessarily strike at much higher velocities than that because they're accelerated to at least Earth's escape velocity on descent.
Say you have a 1500 kg car with a 100 hp engine, which starts from a standstill and runs for 5 seconds. How fast will the car be moving at the end of this run? This depends on how much friction the vehicle experiences, and is difficult to accurately predict. Try a similar calculation with a rocket in space, and you can calculate its final speed with a very high degree of certainty.
But now consider the potential impact of a malfunction: if the car engine fails to start, you might be inconvenienced, but you will be fine. On the other hand, if the rocket engine fails to ignite in space, you can't perform necessary orbital maneuvers and you might be in deep trouble.
It's something about environment on Earth being fundamentally hospitable to human life, and environment in space being similarly inhospitable. Because of this, malfunctions and unpredictable system dynamics on Earth are most often just minor inconveniences, while malfunctions in space / underwater / deep underground are disastrous events.
On a smaller but more relatable scale: it's like the difference between a car or a train, and an airplane. When you have a malfunction on a car or a train, an appropriate response is just to stop; when you have a malfunction on an airplane, you can't just stop, you have to keep things working long enough to get to land before you can stop.
One is mildly inconvenient, the other is deathly inconvenient. Yes, many aspects of the extraterrestrial environment are predictable, but the consequences for being wrong are far greater.
And as another has noted, most deaths during space flight actually occurred in the atmosphere anyway.
Is this a pitch for a near-Earth Uber service?
The mechanism to run the net can break. It has broken during flight before. At that point you have to put on an arm-length glove, stick your hand in the tank, then smash all the feces up against the wall of the tank manually.
You need to do this because at a certain point if you open the toilet to use it there's a very good chance you'll get something floating _out_ of the toilet.
Free floating zero-g human waste is an absolute nightmare.
The proper version of Murphy Law, which seems missing on Wikipedia is ~ "If a part can be installed in more than one position, it will be incorrectly installed in the field given enough time"
It is almost last on the mitigating risk pyramid, training people to do things properly. PPE is the only one lower.
To apply it here, would be "inadvertently stepping on it". They chose to train staff not to step on it.
You can't mitigate all risk, maybe it was the best choice.
Which got my thinking and Ducking, and yes, in 2014 ISS got a 3D printer.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/3-d-printer-powered-up...
Regarding some comments on "average", "male", "34", well they ain't the average dude, they are models T101 in the flesh (to begin with, and then they get extra training).
But man.. I misplace a screwdriver and I stress..