OSP: reliability and survivability

Am 14 Sep 2003 15:00:13 GMT schrieb "Rand Simberg":

Why would ANY Ariane be truly and fully man-rated. I can not imagine why
this would be done, since it can be hideously expensive to man-rate a
vehicle. And since Ariane is first and foremost a commercial launch
vehicle, there is no economic incentive (as yet) to man-rate it.
[...]
That's not man rating a vehicle. That's designing a launch system to
accommodate an on-pad abort.

I beg to differ. It is (primarily seen) a basic design descision, if a
launcher has to be man rated or not. We have not more the 1960's,
where you had to take, what already existed, and man-rate it for
launching a new type of (this time human) payload.

For example the Ariane-4 was never thought to be man rated, because it
was INTENDED to be a satellite launcher. OTOH, Ariane-5 was ORIGINALLY
intended to be the launcher of the then projected European Hermes
space plane (a small shuttle comparable to the actual Japanese
project). When the Hermes project was abandoned, the Europeans did not
abandon the launcher too, because the payload weight projections for
the future showed, that soon would be need for a launcher capable of
more than 4.5 metric tons to GTO [that was the Ariane-4 limit]. So
they developed (and go on with development) some upper stage variants,
that made the original LEO heavy lifter (20-30 ton class) a capable
GTO lifter up to about 10 metric tons into GTO.

As a conclusion the Ariane-5 can be seen as a principally man rated
launcher by design, and it could "relatively" easy re-gain that
"award" of actually BEING man rated.

cu, ZiLi aka HKZL (Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker)
--
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On 14 Sep 2003 19:35:01 GMT, in a place far, far away, Heinrich
Zinndorf-Linker made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Am 14 Sep 2003 15:00:13 GMT schrieb "Rand Simberg":

Why would ANY Ariane be truly and fully man-rated. I can not imagine why
this would be done, since it can be hideously expensive to man-rate a
vehicle. And since Ariane is first and foremost a commercial launch
vehicle, there is no economic incentive (as yet) to man-rate it.
[...]
That's not man rating a vehicle. That's designing a launch system to
accommodate an on-pad abort.

I beg to differ. It is (primarily seen) a basic design descision, if a
launcher has to be man rated or not. We have not more the 1960's,
where you had to take, what already existed, and man-rate it for
launching a new type of (this time human) payload.

That's the only context in which the term "man rated" makes sense.

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
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[I've clipped the attributions, because I'm not sure who said what,
except that Rand said the second. Or something like that.]

Another area of man-rating involves modifying/adding avionics to
enable health-monitoring of the crew. I've been told that that
is NOT as easy or cheap as it may sound!

That's the only vehicle change that I could see being worthwhile to
add.

What does "health-monitoring of the crew" mean in practice? Pulse rate
and blood pressure would seem to be easy enough. General activity ditto.
At least crude real-time EKG and EEG might be done with a bit more
invasiveness, but not a lot. Wireless to get it to the ship systems and
back to the ground.

On 14 Sep 2003 20:15:00 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Allen Thomson) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

[I've clipped the attributions, because I'm not sure who said what,
except that Rand said the second. Or something like that.]

Another area of man-rating involves modifying/adding avionics to
enable health-monitoring of the crew. I've been told that that
is NOT as easy or cheap as it may sound!

That's the only vehicle change that I could see being worthwhile to
add.

What does "health-monitoring of the crew" mean in practice? Pulse rate
and blood pressure would seem to be easy enough. General activity ditto.
At least crude real-time EKG and EEG might be done with a bit more
invasiveness, but not a lot. Wireless to get it to the ship systems and
back to the ground.

I think that he meant health monitoring the vehicle, so you know ASAP
whether or not to abort.

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Swap the first . and @ and throw out the ".trash" to email me.
Here's my email address for autospammers:

In sci.space.policy Bent C Dalager wrote:
In article ,
The Ruzicka Family wrote:

Why would ANY Ariane be truly and fully man-rated. I can not imagine why
this would be done, since it can be hideously expensive to man-rate a
vehicle. And since Ariane is first and foremost a commercial launch
vehicle, there is no economic incentive (as yet) to man-rate it.

The question is whether Ariane is first and foremost a project based
on economics or a national prestige project. If it's the latter, then
it wouldn't really matter how expensive it would be or whether or not
man-rating would be useful in any way.

But I don't think Ariane is foremost a national prestige project. So instead
of man-rating, the next step will be Ariane 5 ECA.


Cheers
Bent D

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker wrote:


As a conclusion the Ariane-5 can be seen as a principally man rated
launcher by design, and it could "relatively" easy re-gain that
"award" of actually BEING man rated.

But the Hermes aspect got dropped well before the first one was built,
were any of the man-rated design safety criteria relaxed in the
interests of weight reduction and economy in the finished vehicle?

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:


I think that he meant health monitoring the vehicle, so you know ASAP
whether or not to abort.



That would make a lot more sense, although monitoring the crew's health
would probably allow one to know to the second when the **** hit the fan.

Pat

In sci.space.policy Pat Flannery wrote:


Rand Simberg wrote:


I think that he meant health monitoring the vehicle, so you know ASAP
whether or not to abort.



That would make a lot more sense, although monitoring the crew's health
would probably allow one to know to the second when the **** hit the fan.

But that would be too late for teh crew. Given the extremely low tolerance
level for losing crews, you need to know well in advance to anything that
would sigifcantly affect crew health readouts, or you won't have time for
counteraction.


Pat


--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Sander Vesik wrote:

But that would be too late for teh crew. Given the extremely low tolerance
level for losing crews, you need to know well in advance to anything that
would sigifcantly affect crew health readouts, or you won't have time for
counteraction.



I should have stuck a "wink" on that one... I wasn't being completely
serious.

Pat

h (Rand Simberg) wrote

I think that he meant health monitoring the vehicle, so you know ASAP
whether or not to abort.

Oh. In that case, one can imagine a vast, multidimensional
and nonlinear set of circumstances that need to be monitored and
interpreted in realish time. Hopeless overall, but maybe you
could pick out the major threats and try to identify predictive
indicators.