WI Challenger was just another shuttle name?

Incidentally, had the crew been cut to a maximum of four, all sat on the upper deck, then ejector seats are doable.
Ejector seats working to Mach 3 nearly bridge the gap of the SRB - which fall at mach 5. It is the only viable escape system to work on the shuttle; everything else is too heavy or too expensive.

IIRC, the Energia/Buran system - the Soviet Shuttle equivalent - had seats for 10 on two decks while being design to be able to eject them all in a Launch Abort Scenario. By having those in the lower deck ejected out to the sides. Maybe using LRBs instead of SRBs made it possible, since you could shut down all the engines with such a setup. Not that anything I just said matters since it only ever made a single, unmanned flight.
 
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Ejector seats working to Mach 3 nearly bridge the gap of the SRB - which fall at mach 5. It is the only viable escape system to work on the shuttle; everything else is too heavy or too expensive.

What about the possibility of making the nose section of the Orbiter into a capsule like a big Apollo CM? Everyone crams in to a rather tight space wearing spacesuits, seated on launch acceleration couches.

With any kind of abort that would result in losing the main Orbiter anyway, the capsule ejects as a whole, lifted off by an escape tower or solids embedded in the bottom sides or some such. The capsule has a heat shield in case of a need to capsule-abort from orbit or high suborbital speeds (such as the Columbia burn-up). When all goes well, the heat shield has a hatch in it and this opens into the expanded crew habitability spaces and the cargo bay beyond them; in an abort where the capsule comes off, they won't be confined to it long, because the capsule is coming down to Earth somewhere--near the launch site for an early abort such as what Challenger would have required, near the designated landing site in such a case as the Columbia reentry failure.

I suppose this option, which I know was considered in some versions or other, comes under the rubric of "too heavy/too expensive." But I'm not sure why it has to. The basic layout of the Orbiter had the crew confined to limited volumes for launch and landing anyway; reconfiguring so the nose of the Orbiter is a cone (or Soyuz-type return capsule shape, which is said to be the most efficient) containing the crew packed in closely would leave other spaces that could be filled with what got displaced from the nose. The big addition is the heat shield and escape rocket systems plus parachutes for the capsule--these costs are the price of a working escape system, it seems to me.

I just can't fathom how ejection seats are supposed to be more than a partial solution no matter what. Surely they are better than nothing; they might have saved the crew of Challenger. But they could do nothing for Columbia, whereas a capsule with its own heat shield could have saved them too. Or taken them down from an Orbiter that arrived in orbit just fine but suffered some terminal mishap up there--meteor damage, a fuel tank explosion or some such--not to worry, they sadly abandon the main body, enter the escape capsule just as they would when descending anyway, close it up just as they would normally--then eject into a return trajectory.

Gemini, I gather, dispensed with the escape tower and went with crew ejection seats. Mercury and Apollo used towers, as did and do Soviet/Russian manned ships. None of these craft had a backup way of returning their crews to Earth if something went wrong with the return capsule's heat shield. Going with ejection seats strikes me as a step backward from the prevailing standards of crew escape; omitting them too is more than two steps backward to a putting fingers in one's ears and singing "la la la nothing bad is going to happen!" Designing in a separable escape capsule the crew routinely rides up and down in into a spaceplane, be it a 100 tonne cargo-bearing orbiter or a 20 tonne space taxi, is a step forward as for the first time there is redundancy in how to get a human crew safely down from orbit (or a failure of the main system in mid-reentry as happened to Columbia).

All I'm saying is, it surely costs money and payload mass, but it isn't obvious to me it has to cost a fatal amount, especially on a big beast like an Orbiter, and the benefits, while only coming into play if something goes terribly wrong, are quite large to offset the costs, though they are certain and mount up each successful mission too.

So it seems odd to say the ejection seats are the only option, when in fact they are at best a partial solution to the whole problem while other more costly options bring much bigger benefits if they are needed.
 
the best shuttle would have been the familiar external tank - orbiter, but mounted on a Saturn V first stage booster. The issue is how to recover the thing. Safety-wise, it was the best option. Later the external tank can be integrated into the orbiter; while the Saturn stage 1 makes a HLV much easier.

Saturn stage makes Horizontal LV easier???

Besides, this does nothing to avoid a columbia type disaster. Youll still have ice and foam hitting tiles and wing edges.
 

Kissinger

Banned
Hey everyone, been reading up a lot into our space escapades with the recent spotlight on SpaceX and was curious as to how the U.S. space program would have been affected without the Challenger disaster.

Assuming the O-ring doesn't fail after takeoff and January 28th, 1986 sees only another routine shuttle launch, what could we expect to see mission-wise from NASA now that it has another 3 years of uninterrupted launches to work with and no loss in confidence? Is there a better chance of making Space Station Freedom a reality, or is a different shuttle disaster inevitable?

You have to change NASA, the O-Rings were destroyed by the cold, in fact there were warnings on the night before based on Doscoverys last mission.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKFrhYJvlc8&feature=youtube


Part one of four of a show discussing what happened, the lead up, and some of the politics that day. If not Challenger then another.
 
An accident was inevitable. To make a long story short, in 1972 NASA had obtained funds to build the shuttle by promising it would earn money launching all satellites in America - military and science and commercial satellites. All of them.
To do that it had to fly once a week, 60 times a year.
The shuttle as build just couldn't do that - the best it did was 8 times a year, in 1995.
In 1986 NASA planned to fly the shuttle 24 times in the year, but as of January was already very late in the schedule.
They pushed like mad, and the result was a disaster.

The "near miss" scenario unfortunately can't work. Had NASA stoped the shuttle, satellites would have piled up on hangars, Congress and critics would have jumped on the space agency - what, you can't fly more than 8 times a years, scandal, and on.

It was a train wreck, and a desperate situation.

The best thing to avoid Challenger
a) don't build the shuttle in 1972
b) give shuttle Skylab B - a space station changes all.

More than inevitable, it was predicted. In 1983 or 1984, Analog had an article entitled "The Shuttle is Going to Prang" covering several ways everything could go wrong. I have the article buried in my basement among all my old Analogs.
 
Separable crew cabin SNIP

It was actually proposed after Challenger in a round of "Shuttle II" discussions. Johnson Space Center's proposal involved a complete rewrite of the Shuttle design--changes included:

--Payload bay contained inside the Orbiter, accessed by hinging the entire rear section of the fuselage down.

--RP1/LOX boosters, carried on the back of the Shuttle next to the disposable LH2 tanks

--A seperable crew cabin that would have its own wings, power, propulsion, etc, to do as you describe, and to act as a Space Station escape vehicle eventually.

--Launching without LC-39, or even much of a launch tower--just pull onto runway, lift vertically, and fire.

shuttleiicm.jpg


shuttleiid.jpg


The old Beyond Apollo blog had a more detailed summary, and sources, but since Portree moved over to WIRED, most of the information has been gone.

No funding for any aspect of the Shuttle II program ever materialized--as OV-105 Endeavour was actually already under construction at the time of STS-51-L, it was decided that that orbiter would just be finished and the Shuttle program would be largely scaled back as focus shifted to Freedom/Fred/Alpha/ISS.
 
Here some information on Shuttle II program
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3876.15.html
but you need to be member to see the pictures...

this Johnson Space Center's Shuttle Proposal
Design for payload of 10 tons or 11 Astronauts to a US Space Station
it burn liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid hydrocarbon (kerosene or propane) fuel with liquid oxygen
the oxygene is stored inside wing tanks, the fuel in four external Tanks. (in Orange)
launch mass is 550 tons, with empty mass of 50 to 75 tons

powerd by second generation SSME
one STME with extend telescoping exhaust nozzle
two STBE with high thrust buring hydrocarbon, who dropt with there Tanks (the Orange tanks with metal ending)
for orbit are twin OMS engines, who are derivative of the RL-10 engine

the cargobay has a unique way to open no doors like STS
but hinge the tail section downward.

for safety JSC Shuttle II has a full Escape system
the cockpit can seperate from rest
be a Spaceship in orbit and would land like Dynasoar

it not use the VAB or Launch 39A/B, but it pull out his hanger to new launch site. were its erected, fueled and Launch
 
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Archibald

Banned
Saturn stage makes Horizontal LV easier???

Besides, this does nothing to avoid a columbia type disaster. Youll still have ice and foam hitting tiles and wing edges.

Ah, sorry, too much accronyms. It is a NASA illness: the CM takes the LM into a LLO, the SPS fires for the TEI, the STS RMS catch the OWS, and on.
HLV meant Heavy Lift Vehicle (not horizontal)

But sure, the shuttle had plenty of failure modes. In the end it is better never build the thing.

The SSME, for example, had fragile turbopumps always on the edge of exploding into showers of hot metal, damaging hydraulics nearby.

Mike Mullane, in his (highly recommended) memories Riding Rockets has two more failures modes.
- a SRB that does not separate at burnout, leaving 100 000 pounds of metal on the side of the E.T.
- to feed the SSMEs from the external tank there were plumbing that ran through the orbital belly... and heatshield. So there were doors there, to be closed. If they did not closed, well, a STS-107 would happen.


By having those in the lower deck ejected out to the sides

I have difficulties figuring that. I can't see an ejector seat firing sidewards :confused:
Or perhaps there were rails in the cabin, and before firing the seats slided laterally, out of the Buran, before shooting upwards ?
But considering how weird the Soyuz abort system actually is, I should not be surprised.
 
AI have difficulties figuring that. I can't see an ejector seat firing sidewards :confused:
Or perhaps there were rails in the cabin, and before firing the seats slided laterally, out of the Buran, before shooting upwards ?
But considering how weird the Soyuz abort system actually is, I should not be surprised.
Well two of the crew on the B-52 have to settle for downwards-firing ejector seats, so it's not impossible.
 
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