1/27/1967

Bang, Zoom, Straight to the Moon!

 

Uh, I guess so, after a fashion ....

 

Well I know it wasn't immediate, but that's what sprang to mind.

 

This thread went swiftly to a weird place.

 

My teacher asked us do a couple of drawings of things we wished for. One of mine showed the three parachuting out of the spacecraft. I worked the crayons hard and tried to do my best. Sad time.

 

In a creepy side note, both the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters were within a week of this date when they took place.

 

My mom was 10.

 

sad story all around. i visited kennedy space center last month and it was interesting to see some of the launch pad safeguards they now have in place. the scariest thing is that basically the astronauts have a fly-wire thingy they can use to escape, then they get in this bright yellow, apparently fire-proof armored personnel carrier and drive away. but they can't test or practice on this fly-wire thing; they test it with sandbags. so basically if something went wrong at the launch, pre-ignition stage, odds aren't good of getting out of there again.

still the most amazing thing i learned when i was there was that the computers on the first apollo crafts - including the one that made it to the moon - were as powerful as a calculator is today. and yet we still made it to the moon and back safely several times. the whole apollo program was an incredible feat accomplished in a short time after JFK promised to land on the moon by the end of the decade.

 

Not sure I agree with you here, leo. For one thing, the biggest reason White, Grissom, and Chaffee couldn't get out was because the door, which opened inward, was all but sealed shut by the highly-pressurized atmosphere inside. That made it damn near impossible for a panicking man in a bulky space suit with tight quarters and rapidly disappearing oxygen to pull the thing open. As a result, the hatch design was totally redone for Apollo, and those measures translated into the crafts today. Systems are now in place to get the astronauts out of the shuttle, down the gangway, and into their zip lines about as rapidly as can be imagined. There's still, of course, the possibility of accident and error, but I would hardly say "odds aren't good of getting out of there again."

 

ok mert, but the astronauts don't actually practice on the fly-line or zip line. so as it was explained to us on the tour, these guys would have seconds - 5? 10? 20? who knows - to get from buckled in onto the zip wire, down to the ground and into the waiting vehicle. so even though they can get out of the vehicle, in this type of "abandon ship" emergency with only a few seconds to get to safety - on a system that the astronauts haven't tested - doesn't look like good odds to me.

that said, obviously the improvements in technology and safety systems mean more than likely they'll never have something go so horribly wrong on the launch pad, so another apollo I scenario is far less likely. of course that doesn't preclude the thing from blowing up once launched or on re-entry, but that's another story...