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No escape tower on Dragon / Falcon 9
On Sep 30, 8:23*pm, Alain Fournier wrote:
Dr J R Stockton wrote: On Sep 29, 11:05 pm, Jochem Huhmann wrote: writes: "the company is considering replacing the escape tower with an integrated escape system using propellant intended for deorbit, “because you’re going to want to escape or deorbit, but not both,” Musk noted." Straight thinking, but a bit too straight... These are very different scenarios: In one you want the capsule to move away from an exploding booster as fast as possible, with very little need for an exact trajectory, and in the other you want a rather gentle, but very precise firing. Deorbiting by getting a hell of a kick in the butt with 20g is not exactly what you want anyway. So use an adequate number of smaller motors. *For escape, fire them all at once. *For de-orbit, fire a few at a time, symmetrically- positioned. Since escape thrust should be reliably survivable, and de-orbit acceleration can be at least as great as average ascent acceleration, the total number of motors need not be large. Align the motors through the centre of gravity, so that if one fails to light the capsule is not made to spin and is sent not far off- course. Instead of using it for de-orbit, why not use it for staging? I'm not sure about this, but I think that the escape tower is useless (as an escape tower) by the time you are dumping the first stage. So why not fire the escape tower rockets to pull away from the first stage? Alain Fournier Because the interface between the capsule and service modules and service module and upperstage are not designed for tension. Also the escape tower is jettison after staging to make sure it is available for problems during staging and upperstage ignition |
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