Category: Space and flight

Posts about flying in atmospheres, or outside of them

Shuttle lesson: no crew capsule on the side designs

Of course, the Columbia and Challenger accidents have reminded us we need to be ever vigilant. Despite more than two years of careful work to prevent foam shedding from the shuttle’s main tank, my STS-114 mission lost a large piece of foam on ascent, in a circumstance very similar to what happened to Columbia on STS-107. Preventing foam loss was a top objective for the return-to-flight effort, and while this turned out to be an embarrassment, I believe it sent a clear message—future boosters and spacecraft should be designed to protect the ship’s reentry system (the heatshield) because rockets will always shed “stuff” like insulation and ice during the tumultuous minutes of ascent to orbit. This is why we will see future spacecraft designed with the reentry ship on the top of the rocket, rather than beside it, as was the case with the space shuttle. The STS-114 incident was a very sobering reminder that a complex system like the shuttle can never be made completely safe, despite everyone’s best efforts. Our future space travelers will be safer due to the lessons learned from the shuttle missions.

Leinbach, Michael and Jonathan Ward. Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew. Arcade Publishing; New York. 2018. p. 294

Our generalization defect

One big surprise from Michael Leinbach and Jonathan Ward’s Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew is the claim that people at NASA hadn’t anticipated the catastrophic loss of a Shuttle during reentry. That despite of the delicacy of the thermal protective tiles and the fatal consequences expected from their failure, the lack of engines and thus any way to salvage a single failed landing attempt, and the long period of commitment to a particular landing site from deorbit burn to touchdown. The lesson drawn from Challenger, in spite of all the training of all the people at NASA in statistics and rigour, is that ‘these things fail during liftoff’ — a bit of a mad generalization for a vehicle built to take the crew through a series of environments, each of which would almost immediately kill them without technological protection, from the extremely high pressure from drag at max-Q during liftoff, through the fatal vacuum of space, through fiery reentry through plasma above mach 18 to an unpowered glider landing. Assuming that the first thing that went fatally wrong would be the standard is like getting on the back of a charging bull covered in poison-tipped spines in the middle of a minefield and thinking: “This is the one that kills you by stomping on your head”.

One small quibble: the subtitle of this book is misleading. I expected it to be much more about Columbia’s crew and final mission, whereas the bulk of it is about the debris recovery efforts across the country after the shuttle disintegrated.

What it’s like to hear but not see the Toronto Air Show

A tweet of mine, written in a moment of irritability aggravated by the sound of jets roaring overhead, has gotten some attention by virtue of being incorporated into some news articles about social media commentary on the Toronto Air Show.

In addition to my standard gripes about the wastefulness of jet engine use, the undesirability of unwanted background noise, and the militarism embodied in combat aircraft development, I suggested that there are people in Toronto who find the experience of being a bystander during the noise as troubling or a reminder of trauma, having heard military jets operating at close quarters during any number of recent conflicts, from Gaza to Afghanistan to Yemen, or during interception flights carried out by domestic air forces.

A disturbing amount of the response on Twitter expressed anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly an assertion that (a) people who have experienced conflict and now live in Toronto now live in preferable life circumstances and therefore (b) they owe certain moral obligations to people who previously lived in the place they now inhabit, to wit just lumping it and not complaining while these acrobatic displays are put on. To some extent my interpretation of the comments was inevitably coloured by Twitter’s reputation as an especially hostile and personal platform, but I think even when viewed with as much objectivity as can be mustered they brought unnecessary hostility to a discussion ultimately about public policy, specifically whether such spectacles should continue.

It’s entirely fair to criticize me for assuming what somebody else’s life experience would mean, in terms of their experience of these noises. That being said, the basic parameters of something like post-traumatic stress disorder are publicly known and it seems plausible to me that anyone who has traumatic memories of being close to combat in which jets operated (whether as a soldier or a civilian) would have some chance of being triggered by the sound of an air show. Given the population of Toronto, it’s plausible that hundreds of people with PTSD are within earshot of each loud noise made by flying aircraft. It’s much more speculative, but I have also wondered about the number of people who can have panic attracts triggered by a stimulus like a jet engine sound find it triggering due to associations they have made through fiction, specifically quasi-realistic military computer games and films which realistically depict violence like Saving Private Ryan. Statistically very few people, even during times of mass conscription, faced intense combat of the kind depicted in the film, but probably a majority of the adult population has now seen multiple detailed immersive representations, whether through films like Spielberg’s or depictions like HBO’s Generation Kill or Band of Brothers.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s the same thing at all, but I have my own negative associations with hearing but not seeing military jets at low altitude nearby, as I lived in North Oxford within earshot of at least some of the approaches to RAF Brize Norton and we used to listen to Vickers refuelling aircraft and B-52s flying in at all times of day and night (familiar eventually in their shrieks and rumbles) and speculate about whether they were coming back from Iraq or from Afghanistan, maybe carrying coffins.

I don’t think social media griping is going to lead to the abolition of the airshow, but I do think it’s a good thing to have a public dialog about what people in the city are going through in terms of their mental health and the choices we make together affecting it.

Those with any opinions on the matter are invited to comment, anonymously if you like.

Ham, the first primate astronaut

Then they led him out again, trying to get him near a mockup of a Mercury capsule, where the television networks had set up cameras and tremendous lights. The reporters and photographers surged forward again, yammering, yelling, exploding more camera lights, shoving, groaning, cursing—the usual yahoo sprawl, in short—and the animal came unglued again, ready to twist the noodle off anybody he could get his hands on. This was interpreted by the Gent [the news media] as a manifestation of Ham‘s natural fear upon laying eyes once again on the capsule, which looked precisely like the one that had propelled him into space and subjected him to such severe physical stresses.

The stresses the ape was reacting to were probably of quite another sort. Here he was, back in the compound where they had zapped him through his drills for a solid month. Just two years ago he had been captured in the jungles of Africa, separated from his mother, shipped in a cage to a goddamned desert in New Mexico, kept prisoner, prodded and shocked by a bunch of humans in white smocks, and here he was, back in a compound where they had been zapping him through their fucking drills for a solid month, and suddenly there was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! Totally out of their gourds! Yammering, roaring, brawling, exploding lights beside their bug-eyed skulls! Suppose they threw him to these assholes! Fuck this—

At some point in the madhouse scene out back of Hanger S, a photograph was taken in which Ham was either grinning or had on a grimace that looked like a grin in the picture. Naturally, this was the picture that went out over the wire services and was printed in newspapers throughout America. Such was the response of the happy chimpanzee to being the first ape in outer space … A fat happy grin… Such was the perfection with which the Proper Gent observed the proprieties.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York. 1979. p. 223–4 (italics and ellipses in original)

The space race as single combat

With the decline of archaic magic, the belief in single combat began to die out. The development of the modern, highly organized army and the concept of “total war” seemed to bury it forever. But then an extraordinary thing happened: the atomic bomb was invented, with the result that the concept of total war was nullified. The incalculable power of the A-bomb and the bombs that followed also encouraged the growth of a new form of superstition founded upon awe not of nature, as archaic magic had been, but of technology. During the Cold War period small-scale competitions again took on the magical aura of a “testing of fate,” of a fateful prediction of what would inevitably happen if total nuclear war did take place. This, of course, was precisely the impact of Sputnik I, launched around the earth by the Soviets’ mighty and mysterious Integral in October 1957. The “space race” became a fateful test and presage of the entire Cold War conflict between the “superpowers,” the Soviet Union and the United States. Surveys showed that people throughout the world looked upon the competition in launching space vehicles in that fashion, i.e., as a preliminary contest proving final and irresistible power to destroy. The ability to launch Sputniks dramatized the ability to launch nuclear warheads on ICBMs. But in these neo-superstitious times it came to dramatize much more than that. It dramatized the entire technological and intellectual capability of the two nations and the strength of the national wills and spirits. Hence … John McCormack rising in the House of Representatives to say that the United States faced “national extinction” if she did not overtake the Soviet Union in the space race.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York. 1979. p. 124–5 (ellipses in original)

Related:

Fighter pilots’ hazardous lifestyles

More fighter pilots died in automobiles than in airplanes. Fortunately, there was always some kindly soul up the chain to certify the papers “line of duty,” so that the widow could get a better break on the insurance. That was okay and only proper because somehow the system itself had long ago said Skol! and Quite right! to the military cycle of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving, as if there were no other way. Every young fighter jock knew the feeling of getting two or three hours’ sleep and then waking up at 5:30 a.m. and having a few cups of coffee, a few cigarettes, and then carting his poor quivering liver out to the field for another day of flying. There were those who arrived not merely hungover but still drunk, slapping oxygen tank cones over their faces and trying to burn the alcohol out of their systems, and then going up, remarking later: “I don’t advise it, you understand, but it can be done.” (Provided you have the right stuff, you miserable pudknocker.)

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York. 1979. p. 37 (italics in original)