School

Aced my first exam ever at Mines (at least as far as I can recall):

Dinner is on me tonight. And no, you’re not invited.

Last year, the Student Body at Mines voted on bus passes and the initiative to fund them was passed overwhelmingly. Thus, I’ve been trying to make it a point to ride the bus whenever I can.

I usually just walk to school. It’s a short 10-15 minute walk, depending where I campus I need to be. However, I’ve been trying to find out of riding the bus would work.

Well, today I finally say down and figure it out. There are two regular buses that literally run right by my place (the stop is right outside my bedroom window): the 16 and the 17. They stop about three minutes from each other at :44 and and :47 past the hour and then again at :14 and :17 past the hour (every 30 minutes or so). It’s about a 3 minute ride from there to the where I get off (about four stops later). It saves about 10 minutes of walking and makes sure I get to class on time, so I’m going to try and make it a regular thing.

Everything up until now has been background information. It sets the stage for what’s to come; which in this case is Saving Men From Exploding Rockets.

If you recall image from the last post, you might remember (or may, in fact, be currently looking at) a slender needle looking section at the very top of the rocket. Contrary to popular belief, this does not make the rocket more aerodynamic (at least in any significant way). What it does do, and I’ll admit I did not know this until I visited Lockheed Martin, is Save Men From Exploding Rockets.

How do you go about Saving Men From Exploding Rockets? Easy, attach another rocket (preferably not exploding) to them and make that one go faster then the explosion of the current rocket they’re strapped to.

Yup, that’s pretty much all there is to it.

Almost.

Once the fault is detected, it takes less then a second for the rockets to ignite and start carrying the crew downrange.

In order to get away, you need to be moving fast. Very fast. During abortion, the crew experiences up to 17G’s* and blacks out.

To give you an idea of what 17G’s is, imagine going from 0 to 600 km/h (373 mph) in one second. That’s almost as fast as a speeding bullet [1].

Last I checked, there are four main thrusters and eight control thrusters. Rockets would actually be a more fitting description since the device is actually a solid rocket motor (SRM).

SRM’s are fire and forget. That is to say that once they fire, you can’t turn them off. Remember your Estes Rockets from way back when? Pretty much just like that.

Most of the time, the crew will never have to use the LAS (at least that’s the plan). When that’s the case, the LAS module is ejected after the crew has reached sufficient altitude that it is no longer needed.

Here’s a video I managed to dig up that shows an example of the launch abort system test:

Hopefully my unwitty series of articles has piqued at least someones interest. If that is the case, you might want to check out George Campbell’s Visual History of NASA’s Project Constellation (Constellation is the overarching name of the entire project).

John Duncan also has a pretty good write up of the old Apollo Launch Escape System, much of which is still applicable in todays system.

*Nitpickers corner: This is actually spread out along all three axes of travel (vertical, forward, and side), so it’s really not that terrible.

[1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/MariaPereyra.shtml

The end of the last post rhetorically asked: What is Orion?

In short, Orion is the Space Shuttle replacement and the best way to understand Orion is to understand Apollo. So let me back up a little.

Everyone remembers (or at least knows about) the Apollo missions. Giant rockets shooting tiny (in comparison) astronauts into space. NASA’s pretty much going back to that system, except smaller and bigger (yes, I understand the dichotomy there).

Apollo used the Saturn V as a launch vehicle; and as launch vehicles go, it was pretty hefty, shooting 118000 kg of cargo into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). By comparison, Orion will use the Ares I rocket. The Ares I is about 15 meters shorter and 5 meters less in diameter. With its smaller size, it’s only able to launch 25000 kg into LEO. Don’t forget that the area of a circle is proportional to the square of the radius. Thus, if you reduce the radius to half, you end up reducing your area to 1/4.

However, the Crew Module and Lunar Module will both be bigger, carrying six people all the way to the Moon instead of three into space and two to the Moon.

Now you may be asking yourself, “But wait, I thought NASA abandoned the one-time-use Apollo in favor of a reusable Space Shuttle? Why are we going back?” Right you are, for the most part. Apollo was single-use-only and NASA did cut two missions from the end the Apollo program so they could divert funding to the Space Shuttle program. However, Orion is a newer, better, and cheaper Apollo-style space vehicle. Additionally, the Orion capsule will be reusable up to six times. And while I don’t know for sure, it seems that having a partially reusable spacecraft is a good combination between production costs and refurbishing costs.

The other item worth mentioning is that every Orion mission will comprise not one, but two launches. First, the Lunar Module is launched. Then the Command Module and Service Module are launched some time later. The units rendezvous in space and then continue on to the Moon.

That’s Orion in a nutshell.

Next up: How to Save Men From Exploding Rockets

Sources: Data and Pictures from Wikipedia and Lockheed Martin.

Editor’s note: I’m trying for a multi-part series. I’m hoping to post manageable chunks everyday…or there ’bouts.

Quick background: Space Shuttle is severely outdated. New form of space transport needed. Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is the next generation. Lockheed Martin won contract in August 2006. New vehicle system is called Orion.

As part of my Introduction to Space Exploration class for last semester, we had to do group projects. Initially, our group wanted to go to Children’s Hospital and do space-related activities with them. Unfortunately, there was some bureaucracy involved and it ended up not happening. Scrambling to find something else, I asked Dad for the name of his old climbing buddy, Dan, who works at Boeing here in Denver, hoping he might be involved in whatever Boeing has space-related in Colorado. Boeing does have space stuff, unfortunately Dan was unable to help us. He was, however, able to give me a contact, Roger, at Lockheed Martin who is working on Orion. And that’s where we went on warm spring Friday a few months back.

Roger works on the Launch Abort System (LAS) for the Crew Module. And I have to say, it’s a very exciting project…at least from what he was able to show us.

Up next: What is Orion?