jon berndt

Charleston.net: "Shuttle should fly, Apollo astronaut says":

http://www.charleston.net/stories/110103/loc_01apollo.shtml

Exerpts:

"We ought to get the space shuttle back flying," Cunningham said Friday.
"It's the safest spacecraft we've ever had. Two failures out of 113 isn't
bad."

....

"We were very careful after Apollo 1 to keep them from killing us with
kindness," Cunningham said. "I think we're going to end up with some changes
on the space shuttle, but there will be other problems. Anything you change
or add is just one more thing that can fail."

---

Interesting reading.

Jon

rk

Yup, a few more quotes that popped out as "interesting,"
particularly from his perspective, flying after Apollo 1/AS-204:

"We knew it was risky. We weren't stupid," Cunningham said.
"Yes, there are things worth dying for. It's the Christopher
Columbuses and Neil Armstrongs that move us forward. If
Ralph Nader had led the wagon train, we would have never
got anywhere."

-and-

"Nobody will ever accuse Congress of having the right stuff,"
Cunningham said, a reference to the Tom Wolfe book about the
earlydays of manned space flight.

--
rk, Just an OldEngineer
"In God we trust, all others bring data."
-- Framed plaque from the '60s, hanging in the Mission Evaluation
Room at Johnson Space Center, downstairs from Mission Control.

charleston

Define "bad" Walt;-(


This from a guy who's spaceflight success was primarily that of being a
follower of a cranky leader. Engineering *improvements* are what kept the
Shuttle flying without catastrophe for so long after Challenger, IMO.

Here I agree totally. One will never really know where the limits are until
the edge of the envelope tears--ala Apollo 13--for instance. Of course the
Shuttle OFT flights were supposed to define the envelope uncertainties fairly well.


You could replace "right" with "any" for some of the members of Congress.


Nice sig. I presume the data is from properly time-tagged and calibrated
sources too:-)

--

Daniel
http://www.challengerdisaster.info
Mount Charleston, not Charleston, SC

derekl1963nospam

One wonders what the sucess rate of Apollo would have been had it made
it to 113 flights. As it is, it's not statistically much better than
the Shuttle.

Given American experience with capsules, and Soyuz's operational
record, I reject all arguments of the form 'capsules are safer because
they haven't killed anyone in _x_ years' as nostalgia for the Glory
Years, not rational judgement.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to om@io.com, as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

starman

Cunningham's 'Nader' ****ogy doesn't work. Ralph Nader would have been
involved with making safer wagons not leading the wagon train. In the
case of Apollo-1, he would have been opposed to the pure oxygen
atmosphere in the capsule.


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charleston

Okay, reject away. Somewhere in the snipped electrons I wrote IMO, IIRC. I
could add FWIW--the electrons sending the message perhaps.

Thanks, Walt;-)

--

Daniel
http://www.challengerdisaster.info
Mount Charleston, not Charleston, SC

rk

There was of course Apollo 1/AS-204.

Apollo 13 was close to loss of vehicle and crew and could have
easily resulted in that, had the failure happenned at a different
point in the mission.

I do not know how close to a "Bad Day" the lightning strike was.

But for Apollo 1 and 13 as a percentage of the total number of
flights, let's ignore the lightning strike and the waiving of rules
that permitted that launch, that statistic suggests that the
reliability and safety of those systems is not superior to the
Shuttle; perhaps quite the opposite.

We all have recently read the mishap reports for Challenger and
Columbia. It's instructive to go back and read the reports for
Apollos 1 and 13 as well as the reports and memos and do***entation
preceeding each of these mishaps.

- - - - - -

Going back to Gemini, to toss a bit more data into the pot, compare
the mission where the capsule went out of control on-orbit from a
fault and spun up; then put that into today's environment, assume
that a Shuttle did that on-orbit.


There's a lot of nostalgia. I find it instructive to go back and
read the original material. Ditto for the unmanned mishaps. Then
make a rational judgement.

--
rk, Just an OldEngineer
"In God we trust, all others bring data."
-- Framed plaque from the '60s, hanging in the Mission Evaluation
Room at Johnson Space Center, downstairs from Mission Control.

andrew gray

Earth-orbital on Saturn IBs and the like, or lunar with the full "Apollo
kit" - LEM, S-V, CSM?

Going by nothing more than a gut guess, I'd say at least two serious
LOCV incidents in the first case - although we came quite close at least
once (ASTP) to LOC without LOV, and on an expendable the latter's a bit
more f****ving. (Was Liberty Bell 7 a LOV? Apollo 13?)

In the latter case? I'm not sure if there was a landing flight where
something didn't go wrong in a potentially messy way. Gut says five
major accidents, to a first-order approximation, assuming the program
doesn't get canned after one or two. And '13 was *that* close...

[Disclaimer - figures are gut guesses, caveat emptor, may not reflect
actual reality, YMMV, please don't hit me, &c]

--
-Andrew Gray
shimgray@bigfoot.com

derekl1963nospam

Either one. For all intents and purposes, neither the CSM or LEM were
what I'd comfortably call a well debugged spacecraft.

An LOV is an LOV... I'd count Liberty Bell, but not A13 myself, as
the craft returned more-or-less safely and in the intended condition.
It also points up something important, an accident *doesn't* have to
kill the crew or destroy the vehicle to be very serious.

13, the docking problems on 12, the parachutes on 15, the SPS problems
on 16, the leaking RCS on Skylab 4... All things that could have been
exceedingly messy, and not a good record for as few flights as Apollo
had.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to om@io.com, as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

jon berndt

True, *that* argument is not a good one in favor of capsules. The arguments
I can see in favor of such is:

1) Can perform a normal entry in a passive or somewhat passive mode
(ballistic).
2) Can sustain larger unexpected entry accelerations without breaking wings.
3) Fewer systems subject to failure.
4) Thermal protection system simpler (?)
5) More likely to accomodate abort modes in all flight regimes.
....

Jon