Dumping the Shuttle

"Frank Scrooby" wrote in
:

I can never decide is Apollo 13 was a miracle or a marvel of
engineering and ingenuinity. Did God reach down (? where does God
reach from in space? Catholics? Ministers? Anyone from the Vatican?
Help?) and rescue that machine and its three occupants or did a
several thousand determined and professional people on the ground
combine their skills with those of the three men trapped very far from
home in a very damaged spacecraft and somehow make it work long enough
to get them back safely. Or is it a combination of the two, a miracle
of engineering.

It was a combination. A lot of people worked very hard to bring that crew
back, but they were *very* lucky with the timing of the mishap. Had the O2
tank exploded after the LM had already undocked and gotten to the point
where it would have had to drop the descent stage to abort back to the CSM,
the crew wouldn't have survived because the ascent stage alone would have
been insufficient as a lifeboat. Had the explosion happened much earlier
after TLI, they wouldn't have been able to stretch the consumables long
enough to get back to Earth.

That aside how close have other 'routine' capsule flights come to
being fatal? The two recent problems with Soyuz are both with a newish
model, or with a recently modified version of the capsule. Besides for
Apollo 13 I don't know of any other Apollo in-flight accidents or near
misses (anyone?). There was Apollo 1, and that was flight ready
hardware AFAIK. One of the Mercury flights (Glenn I think) had a
problem with the retro rocket pack, and Gordo Cooper's Mercury flight
had a malfunctions on virtually all the systems before the end of the
flight. Of cause information on the Russian problems might be less
easy to get one's hands one.

Gemini 8's stuck thruster
Apollo 16's SPS gimbal problem (debatable how close that was)
ASTP's toxic leak

Soyuz landing mishaps are summarized in
http://www.jamesoberg.com/soyuz.html. Some highlights:

Soyuz 5's service module failed to jettison after deorbit, resulting in
nose-first entry until the struts burned through and the entry module
righted itself
Soyuz TM-5 nearly jettisoned its service module *before* deorbit, which
would have stranded the crew in orbit

Let's look at the problem another way:

What kills astronauts (and cosmonauts)?

Is it faulty design? Bad maintenance? Or old airframes? Bad
Management.

For Apollo 1 I have to go with a faulty design.

For the first Russian space loss (was it a Soyuz?) it was a faulty
design, the re-entry module interior was too small to allow the crew
to wear their pressure suits during re-entry.

That was actually Soyuz 11, the second Soyuz fatal accident. The first was
Soyuz 1, which had a parachute failure (also a design flaw).

For Challenger, a bad design (who the @#$% thought segmented SRBs were
a good idea?)

Nobody thought segmented SRBs were a great idea, but they were the only
booster that would fit within OMB's $1G/year development cost cap.

and a bad management decision (launching despite
recommendations of the SRB manufacturers).

Close. Actually, the engineers at the SRB manufacturer recommended against
launch; their management overruled them.
--
JRF

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