Re: getting back is as hard as getting there?
From: Sander Vesik (sander_at_haldjas.folklore.ee)
Date: 06/21/04
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Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 19:51:43 +0000 (UTC)
Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> wrote:
> In article <1087818898.572838@haldjas.folklore.ee>,
> Sander Vesik <sander@haldjas.folklore.ee> wrote:
> >> Mind you, emergency descents and normal descents can be different. It's
> >> desirable for an emergency descent not to mess up the vehicle too much,
> >> but that's not strictly necessary.
> >
> >But all it *really* needs to do is to get to an altitude and speed where
> >humans can be ejected, with their own parachutes (and potentialy in a
> >a capsule)...
>
> In practice, though, unless they're in their own reentry capsule(s) within
> the vehicle, that means it has to be capable of surviving a full reentry
> (perhaps not entirely undamaged, but largely intact). The speed and
> altitude where safe ejection is possible are practically zero by orbital
> standards.
You should be able to eject the humans at 25-30km, esp if you are planning
for such and at considerable speed. Sure, it will add 3 extra unsurvivable
failure modes (ejection, capsule/airbag, parachute failure) but you could
eliminate lots of weight from what could be a single person "uplink" only
capsule.
>
> >...Saving hardware that has bad failures appears to get way too much
> >attention compared to issues that are IMHO much more important.
>
> Given that things *will* go wrong during development and testing, it's a
> huge advantage in practice if you usually get the vehicle back. Not only
> is it expensive to replace, but sorting out the cause of the failure is a
> whole lot easier if you can take the hardware apart and investigate.
Well, if this is a vehicle that is designed for the 'uplink' part only,
wouldn't yoube expecting to lose most of the capsules anyways as soon as
youstart with serious live tests? That is - unless the reason it was for
uplink only was that it did teh descent at non-survivable / too uncomfortable
accelerationor tempreture but remained intact one would expect it to destruct
on re-entry or at its end from the profile.
-- Sander +++ Out of cheese error +++
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