John Young once said a Return to Launch Site abort would require a string of miracles interspersed by acts of God. What if, on STS-51L the crew of the Challenger some how realized there was a problem with the SRB, separated from the stack and attempted to either ditch or return to the launch site. Would the shuttle program survive with such a dramatic scene? what would the effects on NASA be?
Space Shuttle Challenger in-flight aborts
- Thread starter Griml0ck122
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Challenger's crew were in a very unfortunate spot where they had no good options. They really couldn't have detached before the end of SRB burnout, and it's possible that the additional loads of the radical maneuvers on the SRB and ET would have caused the failure to happen earlier in flight. Now assuming something goes different such that they are able to survive (the burnthrough happens late enough in flight that the ET isn't compromised structurally before SRB burnout, for instance), I think that the Shuttle will survive--it did IOTL, after all, which was hardly undramatic (the failure of a highly publicized launch shown live to schoolchildren across the country).
NASA will still be under a massive cloud, but the question will be if they can find their way to a Return to Flight any sooner and with less public pressure as a result of not losing the crew...but perhaps if they fail to learn any of the critical lessons in the meantime as a result.
NASA will still be under a massive cloud, but the question will be if they can find their way to a Return to Flight any sooner and with less public pressure as a result of not losing the crew...but perhaps if they fail to learn any of the critical lessons in the meantime as a result.
Philip
Donor
In all likelihood, there are still no survivors.
It did OTL. Is this scene any worse than what happened OTL? I watched it live standing on the school's soccer field. It's hard to come up with a more dramatic event. Perhaps if the crew were screaming over the radio...but I doubt those tapes are heard publicly until years later. As soon as the commander declares an emergency, public communications will be cut off.
Roughly the same as OTL. Perhaps the investigation suggests more changes to the SRBs.
You could always have some space program obsessed amateur radio operator with a lack of ethics release the tapes they'd been recording for some reason. It's my understanding at least that there wasn't any form of encryption on the communications, since my parents have a story of breaking into the secured zone to watch a shuttle launch from only a few miles away, in the company of a man who'd done the same for every single shuttle launch. He had a radio tuned to the frequency used between the shuttle and the launch center, and as my dad tells it, when the shuttle reported one particular valve refused to close, he started packing up a full two minutes before NASA scrubbed the launch.
It’s not exactly a ideal source but over three hundred hours of experience in Kerbal Space Program suggests to me that would be harrowing at best.
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E of pi wrote:
Cook wrote:
No they can’t as the corkscrew pattern they flew after the ET collapsed showed they don’t have a great deal of control when detached from the system under thrust. They were never designed or intended to be detached while running and with no way to shut them down… Oddly enough Aerojet the folks who did NOT win the SRB contract had done design and testing work, (for the Air Force IIRC) on a throttling solid booster that, (in theory) could be stopped and restarted in flight but it never went as far as testing an actual booster. To be honest I doubt it would have been affordable among all the other compromises to the STS.
Alanith wrote:
No I think the word you’re looking for here is not ‘harrowing’ but ‘interesting’…
“Define interesting?”
“Oh God! Oh God! We’re all going to die?”
I should point out they were too low as well and even if they could jettison the SRBs safely and then the ET it is unlikely they could have completed a turn-around with enough energy to glid back to the KSC runway. And from my reading the required conditions for an possible survivable ‘ditching’ were so rare as to be almost impossible. (The orbiter would break up, flip, tumble or all the above in most cases even in ‘calm’ seas)
As far as I can find the whole “Return To Launch Site” abort was vastly risky:
Since they were constrained to wait until the SRBs burned out that would take them outside the effective atmosphere so ‘turn-around’ would require flipping the entire Orbiter/ET system with the engines throttled back, (75% was the lowest they could go IIRC) which was itself questionable if the ET interfaces could stand or not, then running them back up to 110% to ‘shed’ the current velocity and try and reverse course before the ET ran out of propellant or they started encountering aerodynamic forces. (The latter more so than the former)
Once they had attained enough velocity to make it back to KSC they would jettison the ET and attempt a glide back to a landing.
Since either or both ‘abort-downrange’ or ‘abort-to-orbit’ were a lot less risky there was little reason to even practice RTLS abort. (I understand Young and Crippen tried it ONE time and failed and they did about as good as anyone could expect)
I think the program would survive no matter the outcome since it did OTL which was pretty much the worst outcome possible. (Well, having it come down ‘short-of-the-runway’ downrange could have been arguably ‘worse’ such as hitting a school in Spain or Italy but since those runways were military bases I’m not sure that would have mattered all the much but considering if they don’t dump the hypergol tanks that’s an issue as well…)
The bigger effect is since the abort ‘works’ is there still the push to make the Shuttle ‘safer’ of which the only actual ‘effective’ outcome was the SRB seal re-design which was already in the works but awaiting funding. Keep in mind that “Challenger” was what finally drove NASA to admit they were pushing the system to hard and even then they ‘simply’ dumped commercial payloads off the manifest. In this case they can spin that the “only” fix needed is the SRB seals, stand down for few months to get them in-place and then ramp right back up to ‘full’ operation since we now “know” the Shuttle is safe and reliable.
I could actually see this ending up allowing them to over-ride Astronaut Corps objections to more PAM flights and getting development of the Shuttle Centaur back on track. That latter one is not a “good” thing btw.
RAndy[/quote]
Cook wrote:
No they can’t as the corkscrew pattern they flew after the ET collapsed showed they don’t have a great deal of control when detached from the system under thrust. They were never designed or intended to be detached while running and with no way to shut them down… Oddly enough Aerojet the folks who did NOT win the SRB contract had done design and testing work, (for the Air Force IIRC) on a throttling solid booster that, (in theory) could be stopped and restarted in flight but it never went as far as testing an actual booster. To be honest I doubt it would have been affordable among all the other compromises to the STS.
Alanith wrote:
No I think the word you’re looking for here is not ‘harrowing’ but ‘interesting’…
“Define interesting?”
“Oh God! Oh God! We’re all going to die?”
I should point out they were too low as well and even if they could jettison the SRBs safely and then the ET it is unlikely they could have completed a turn-around with enough energy to glid back to the KSC runway. And from my reading the required conditions for an possible survivable ‘ditching’ were so rare as to be almost impossible. (The orbiter would break up, flip, tumble or all the above in most cases even in ‘calm’ seas)
As far as I can find the whole “Return To Launch Site” abort was vastly risky:
Since they were constrained to wait until the SRBs burned out that would take them outside the effective atmosphere so ‘turn-around’ would require flipping the entire Orbiter/ET system with the engines throttled back, (75% was the lowest they could go IIRC) which was itself questionable if the ET interfaces could stand or not, then running them back up to 110% to ‘shed’ the current velocity and try and reverse course before the ET ran out of propellant or they started encountering aerodynamic forces. (The latter more so than the former)
Once they had attained enough velocity to make it back to KSC they would jettison the ET and attempt a glide back to a landing.
Since either or both ‘abort-downrange’ or ‘abort-to-orbit’ were a lot less risky there was little reason to even practice RTLS abort. (I understand Young and Crippen tried it ONE time and failed and they did about as good as anyone could expect)
I think the program would survive no matter the outcome since it did OTL which was pretty much the worst outcome possible. (Well, having it come down ‘short-of-the-runway’ downrange could have been arguably ‘worse’ such as hitting a school in Spain or Italy but since those runways were military bases I’m not sure that would have mattered all the much but considering if they don’t dump the hypergol tanks that’s an issue as well…)
The bigger effect is since the abort ‘works’ is there still the push to make the Shuttle ‘safer’ of which the only actual ‘effective’ outcome was the SRB seal re-design which was already in the works but awaiting funding. Keep in mind that “Challenger” was what finally drove NASA to admit they were pushing the system to hard and even then they ‘simply’ dumped commercial payloads off the manifest. In this case they can spin that the “only” fix needed is the SRB seals, stand down for few months to get them in-place and then ramp right back up to ‘full’ operation since we now “know” the Shuttle is safe and reliable.
I could actually see this ending up allowing them to over-ride Astronaut Corps objections to more PAM flights and getting development of the Shuttle Centaur back on track. That latter one is not a “good” thing btw.
RAndy[/quote]
A question: IF there was only one deck for the crew and there were escape capsules installed derived from B-70, would there have been a chance for the crew to escape 1) when serious anomalies were detected (but miliseconds before the booster got loose and turned into the ET) or 2) since the crew compatiment was to my knowledge still intact until impact into the ocean after the breakup? Were the forces on the crew survivable?