Inside NASA’s Mysterious Rubber Room | Hacker News Reader

Inside NASA’s Mysterious Rubber Room

scriptunasimages.wordpress.com

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Very cool!

And, if you like this, you'd probably also enjoy learning about the Plutonium Pit storage areas at the Pantex plant:

http://cryptome.org/pantex-nukes.htm

http://www.texasradiation.org/pantex.html

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1993/9320/932010.PDF

From your second link:

    On February 2, warning lights on a radiation warning system failed due to 
    previous software modifications to the fail-safe system. It was discovered 
    that no records of the revisions to the software were ever required or 
    maintained, so the direct cause of the malfunction was unclear.

I have no words.

You're surprised that people write buggy software without discipline?

I'm gently surprised that people write buggy software without discipline when they're dealing with something that can kill many people.

I have some small experience with this...

My impression is that you end up with bad code in critical systems due to the exact same forces as anywhere else.

Difference is, rather than ramping up the quality of the development / testing with the seriousness of the application, people tend to ramp up the requirement hair-splitting, ass-covering and accountability obfuscating.

Fighting this requires a rare, uncompromising attitude that often isn't conducive to remaining employed.

That's my experience too.

In addition to that, there are hardware companies that have always seen software as necessary but uninteresting, thus trying to cut costs on it as much as possible, and not knowing how to set up an environment conductive to good software development (like having non-programmer physicists code in C, or still being stuck using 80's source control tools).

This reminds me that I should start asking Therac-25 questions in interviews.

Searching for that led me to this website about a variety of serious bugs.

http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/bugse.html

(A classic case study -- a radiation therapy machine that was badly programmed, resulting in several accidents where patients were given massive overdoses of radiation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

This is one of the reasons I opt-out of airport scans. The less I stand in-front of something emitting radiation the less chance there is for a software error to cause me to get a higher dosage than was intended.

I am surprised that discipline wasn't an externally-applied requirement. Seriously, change management wasn't part of the contract? WTF?

"A study by the DOE Plutonium Vulnerability Working Group concluded that the storage containers used to store pits do not provide an effective containment barrier, and that the effects of aging on the pits, such as corrosion and cracking, are unknown."

Lovely. Glad to see they are taking the necessary precautions to protect the 12k+ pits of plutonium at the Pantex site

Lesson to all: If the word Plutonium appears anywhere in a statement of work that is usually sign you need to adhere to more stringent coding standards.

I think this is the end part of the "Emergency Egress System" which included a slide-wire basket from the top of the vehicle support structure/gantry.

Some of the images at http://history.nasa.gov/ap10fj/as10-image-library.htm do look a lot like the arched solid concrete room entrances, and there are a few of the wire system as well.

I recall (on HN I think) a while back there was an article about the slide part of the system and the crazy specifications required to attain some level of plausible survivability.

Edit: some more images at http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum40/HTML/000164.html including the armoured personnel carrier as a last hope contingency.

Edit 2: Found it! http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/how_t...

No, not exactly. The author points that out in the piece. The zip-line is a later addition that takes you some distance away from the launch pad. The "rubber room" and blast room are, literally, directly underneath the rocket.

The Rubber Room is intended for critical ground crews. The zip line is intended for astronauts.

This is mentioned in the piece as the zip-line is the safer option when you're at the top of the tower and the base of the rocket is on fire.

2min youtube film from Saturn V days -reporter takes the slide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx2BobKku-c

That's James Burke, in the years before he created his excellent "Connections" and "The Day The Universe Changed" series. Highly recommended - I watched every episode when they came out starting in the late 1970s.

Should have known that guy was awesome before Connections.

It's still not clear to me at all why the first room is rubberized. There's an escape slide, a rubber room and the actual chamber that's blast-proof. Why does the middle room need to be rubberized?

From the article: "I quickly noticed how the room got it name as the walls and floor are completely covered in rubber over a soft cushion that was meant to absorb the blast."

The seats in the room also have seat belts. Looks like the room's designers expected a violent experience.

So I am not being facetious when I say I don't understand I I guess your comment makes sense, but honestly... I still don't understand. The rocket explodes, a massive shockwave of expanding gas gets pushed down the chute into the middle room. The actual protected room has a vault-like door, is on springs, has massive padded chairs with seatbelts. That I get. But how does rubberizing the middle room help? How much of the shockwave can it possibly absorb?

I'm not rhetorically trying to say it's useless. I'm perfectly happy to admit that NASA's engineers have a better grasp of this situation than I do. I just don't get how it helps.

I couldn't agree more... it's wholly unclear what the purpose of the rubber is. Presumably it protects against vibration eh

Perhaps this is for the safety of the occupants. If they get thrown out of their harness they don't bang against a metal/concrete wall but a little softer material. Though why this is not even softer material I don't understand.

My guess:

The room was supported by springs according the article. It also said the blasts rivaled small nuclear explosions. If something that big goes boom right over you, those springs are going to be tested. I assume the rubber helps prevent the room from bottoming out should the springs be insufficient. If anything, I think they didn't know what to expect, so they planned for the worst.

Also, that small, 24-hr safe room was lacking in 24 hours worth of amenities, like a bathroom and water supply. But I guess being thirsty or having to urinate is better than exploding.

According to the article, there actually is a toilet (behind the camera)... and supplies for generating oxygen and filtering air, which suggests it's pretty likely there's a bit of water etc too.

I seemed to have failed to mention that their was indeed a toilet. It can be seen on the left in this photo.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walter-s-photo/8200797657/in/ph...

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a way of providing some level of protection while you're still on your way to the truly safe space. That is, if there's an explosion while everyone is still sprinting down the final hallway, the rubber walls could turn make things a little less bad. (Heck, if there were multiple explosions, the rubber might be enough to let you recover in time to get to your seat in the vault before the whole thing goes up.)

I think this is to avoid that split-second when hard walls would create a concussive shock. That shock would make the door ring like a bell and emit a very loud noise that might deafen the ground crew in their secure room.

> An exploding Saturn V was calculated to have the power of a small nuclear bomb

So all you need is a lead-lined refrigerator

[ this was meant as a response to people calling out the image looking weird ]

EXIF of http://scriptunasimages.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/wscriptu... :

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  Date	2012:11:19 09:37:43
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  Artist	Walter Scriptunas II
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No clue why people thought these were heavily photoshopped... Most of the photos I had seen of these rooms the photographer had used a flash, I preferred how the natural lighting looked. It added to the eeriness of the place I think.

Some photos remind me of the MYST series..

I wonder how much of this was designed not so much to ensure the safety of the astronauts and ground crew but rather to ease the mind of the people who had to make the decision to put them at risk that they at least tried to do something?

30 seconds down a chute seems like well, not a realistic survival scenario in the case of catastrophic explosion on the pad.

Rockets are a lot like skyscrapers: they burn slowly and sedately for several minutes until the structural members overheat and collapse. (Assuming kerosene fuel like the Apollo rockets used.)

The upper stages used hydrogen - if that leaks (or the LOX) then your bad day is going to proceed much more rapidly.

"Rubber Room", for me, at least, conjures up a whole different set of images:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/h...

Who says NASA doesn't have a sense of humor.

The occupants are shielded from the blast by many yards of concrete, steel, and sand but the very last line of defense is... a gauze curtain.

I'm not sure if it's the camera or the lighting, but these images all look suspiciously raytraced to me.

There are other photos by other photographers of these same rooms -- http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/04/dismantling-the-s...

Edit: Same room at the other launch pad, 39A vs 39B. Both had identical blast rooms per the article.

Looking at those just makes me even more suspicious.

Compare http://scriptunasimages.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/wscriptu... to http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/shuttle041311/s_d1...

Perhaps things were repainted, but then why does the handle on the door work in the opposite direction?

EDIT: Also, the "emergency egress route" has changed direction? In the Atlantic image, it is pointing "up" the door, indicating that people walk through it towards the camera (when the door is closed). In the Scriptunas image, it points to the left, which doesn't even make sense when the door is closed.

My reading is that when the door's closed you don't need the sign at all since if you can see it, you're already in the blast room. The left-pointing arrow seems like the better way to do it to me, when viewing the open door from the hall (though either is probably perfectly clear). The two sites being built by different contractors seems enough to cover the differences in painting/finishing touches (unless there's a standard open/close direction for vault doors, I wouldn't know :) ).

But then, "raytraced" never occured to me looking at the photos, just "taken by an actual good camera, not a phone, with a fast lens so that it can take good indoors photos without flash."

Those are different doors.

Thus, one one door the emergency egress is "open this door and keep going" and on the other is "go left, through this door which is already open".

As for the door locking or opening by spinning the wheel in different directions - one is inside the room looking out, and the other is outside the room looking in.

The lighting in the first few photos looks really strange, but the rest look fine, I think.

I believe the comparison images are from the other pad, so some differences are not surprising.

The original images look fine to me - they just look like they were taken with a SLR in low light, which may give a slightly odd/unusual feel to them.

This is correct, these were taken at the Pad A rubber room, the others that have been linked to were taken at Pad B. It was quite dark inside. I preferred the look of the natural lighting. Images were shot with a 5D III and 16-35L lens with an ISO of around 3200.

It is the camera. Those images all look like they were shot at very low ISO. This means you get absolutely noise-free images at the expense of long shutter times. Architecture is good at holding still for pictures, so it is not much of an issue.

You are used to high quality (but noise and grain free) CG renderings and low quality photographs. Just wait until you see CG that models proper noise.

The pictures remind me of the Area 51 levels of Tombraider III.

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