Ares I fratricide on Orion during abort

David Spain wrote:

Pat,

I looked at this briefly, but it doesn't seem to take into account
that Orion has an escape rocket. Would not that take it well past
the 7900 foot blast radius? This study seems to assume that Orion
would attempt to parachute through the solid propellant debris.
I thought the escape rocket would assure otherwise. Unless the
escape rocket fails as well, but then forget about 'chutes anyway
right?

I assume they took the LES into account, as note they only show the
danger area on the graph starting after 20 seconds flight time rather
than on launch, and later in the flight, after 70 seconds have passed,
the abort is again shown to be survivable.
Neither of these would be the case if there was no LES on the Orion, as
it would have to detach itself in some way from the Ares booster. So it
must be that a combo of air drag and acceleration pretty much overpowers
the ability of the current LES design to pull the capsule very far from
the booster in a vertical direction, and it just ends up going pretty
much sideways rather than up and sideways, as shown in the PDF graphs
overlaid on the Titan IV explosion photos.

Pat

OM wrote:
...So far, his culpability hasn't been disproved, now has it?


Interesting thing about that PDF, BTW...although it's unclassified, it's
nowhere to be found on the 45th Space Wing website, even though it was
written by the 45th Space Wing.
So who did it behoove to make it public?
The Air Force trying to get more control over NASA, or BoLockMart trying
to get Ares replaced by Atlas 5 or Delta 4?

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:
I assume they took the LES into account, as note they only show the
danger area on the graph starting after 20 seconds flight time rather
than on launch, and later in the flight, after 70 seconds have passed,
the abort is again shown to be survivable.
Neither of these would be the case if there was no LES on the Orion, as
it would have to detach itself in some way from the Ares booster. So it
must be that a combo of air drag and acceleration pretty much overpowers
the ability of the current LES design to pull the capsule very far from
the booster in a vertical direction, and it just ends up going pretty
much sideways rather than up and sideways, as shown in the PDF graphs
overlaid on the Titan IV explosion photos.

Pat

The graph on the last page of this pdf would seem to show that the 'magic'
dynamic pressure figure (Q) seems to be 5 psi, for which Ares I
achieves in the interval between MET 30s and 60s. (MET=Mission Elapsed Time?)

So in other words, at 5 psi or greater Q the LAS will *not* be able to
vertically deliver the Orion capsule to a safe altitude or radial distance
way from the 7900 foot debris cylinder, which would follow the Orion
all the way down to the water surface.

Is this the correct interpretation?

Dave

BTW: Nasawatch may be picking it up now, but this story seems to have broken
back on June 7 according to this link from the Orlando Sentinel,
which attributes the story to Todd Halvorson of the rival paper
Florida Today.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/new...-disaster.html

Also the Sentinel reports that the Halvorson story quotes NASA's Constellation
Program Manager Jeff Hanley with 3 'very' adverbs when describing the first
stage safety, and one 'very' adverb when describing its reliability.
Hanley is also quoted saying 'supercomputer analyses', "prove" that
Orion's LAS will save the crew.

Time for eastern coastal Floridians to invest in hard hats and Nomex beach
wear?

Dave

Couldn't the issue here be resolved by using chute material other
than nylon? How about Kevlar? Or Beta cloth? Something that won't
'heat wilt' Maybe burn through holes on direct contact but not
wilt.

Dave

OM wrote:
...Pat, WRT the problems you had trying to e-mail me that PDF, how
large was it? That might have had something to do with it.




It is 2.19 MB in size. I don't think size was an issue; all three times
I tried to send it a dialog box appeared around 85% through it saying
it had too many errors.
I thought of zipping it to see if that worked, but it's unzippable (I
imagine some sort of compression conflict issue).
Got any clever ideas of how to get it to you, please send them.

Pat

OM wrote:
Although it's not known for certain who went to
who first, Webb apparently got JFK to shut the Air Farce up once and
for all by pointing out that the problem with that particular test
wasn't with the booster at all, but a flaw in the adapter between the
Mercury and the Atlas, and that all the Air Farce was doing was trying
to hype up the blame in the wrong directions in order to scam their
way into regaining control of the space program.


They never have given on the hope of getting into the manned space
program big time, and it would be a real cluster if they did - as the
Air Force, Navy, Army, and even Marines (remember "Hot Eagle"?) would
try to grab control of it.
At least LEO might be susceptible to an argument by the Coast Guard that
the part of it that passes over the US should be under _their_ control,
as it's the coast of the sea of space. :-D

Pat

David Spain wrote:

The graph on the last page of this pdf would seem to show that the
'magic'
dynamic pressure figure (Q) seems to be 5 psi, for which Ares I
achieves in the interval between MET 30s and 60s. (MET=Mission Elapsed
Time?)

So in other words, at 5 psi or greater Q the LAS will *not* be able to
vertically deliver the Orion capsule to a safe altitude or radial
distance
way from the 7900 foot debris cylinder, which would follow the Orion
all the way down to the water surface.

Is this the correct interpretation?

Once the chutes are deployed, the Orion should be descending a lot
slower than the free-falling SRB propellant, at least until the chutes
melt. So the trick is to get _above_ the huge ball of burning SRB
propellant before you deploy the chutes.
Unfortunately, that's going to require a lot bigger (heavier) LES to get
it safe in all abort situations from ignition till stage one jettison,
and for a vehicle that's already being redesigned for excessive mass by
cutting its crew, that's the last thing it needs.



BTW: Nasawatch may be picking it up now, but this story seems to have
broken
back on June 7 according to this link from the Orlando Sentinel,
which attributes the story to Todd Halvorson of the rival paper
Florida Today.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/new...-disaster.html


Also the Sentinel reports that the Halvorson story quotes NASA's
Constellation
Program Manager Jeff Hanley with 3 'very' adverbs when describing the
first
stage safety, and one 'very' adverb when describing its reliability.
Hanley is also quoted saying 'supercomputer analyses', "prove" that
Orion's LAS will save the crew.

Time for eastern coastal Floridians to invest in hard hats and Nomex
beach
wear?

Well, at least on Challenger they ruptured the SRB cases and didn't have
a full-scale explosion over land.
Considering what that Delta II did to the launch site when its solid
strap-ons blew, something like that would have looked like the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah..

Pat

David Spain wrote:
Couldn't the issue here be resolved by using chute material other
than nylon? How about Kevlar? Or Beta cloth? Something that won't
'heat wilt' Maybe burn through holes on direct contact but not
wilt.

Weight gain again.

Pat

OM wrote:
...You have saved this to your hard drive first, right?

Yes, it's in the "Space PDFs" on D drive.

And not doing
some sort of shuffle transfer from Keith's bolloxed domain and your
e-mail server, right? You might try downloading it again to another
part of your hard drive, but before I'd do that I'd open the file and
scroll down to about 85% and see what happens.

File comes up just fine when opened by Adobe Acrobat, although I'm using
a earlier version compatable with Windows 98.

I thought of zipping it to see if that worked, but it's unzippable (I
imagine some sort of compression conflict issue).


...PDFs will compress, just not enough to make it worth the time on
either side.


Got any clever ideas of how to get it to you, please send them.


...Set up a website and make the file available? Or maybe I should go
ahead and sst up a Tor client and skullfrack Keith's IP blocking.


You don't even want to know what a website I would set up would look
like, or the weird **** that would be on it.
There'd be "Family Giant Squid Theater", "Brother MiG and Sister
Sukhoi", "Let's Imagine-Strip Pamala Tiffin", "Tails Of The Venusian
Firewomen", "More Mad Monkey Mysteries", "Luft 66", "Tankie: Tales Of
The Landships In The Big Un' ", the "Little Kiki And The Moths" internet
game for kids... and, of course, "Milla Watch" and "The Complete
Ann-Margret Naughty Links Page". :-D

Pat

OM wrote:

...HOT EAGLE was brought up again recently on "Secret Projects".
That's actually a very interesting site, even if Dwayne gets snotty
with people every now and then just because he likes to be a jerk


"Hot Eagle" was the end result of someone in the Marines stumbling on
Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and deciding the Marines needed something
like a dropship...and only Marines should have the right to vote.
"On The Bounce, Gyrenes!" :-)

Pat