[AR] Re: AW&ST Space Tourism Accident Impact.
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2020 13:22:56 -0500 (EST)
On Fri, 3 Jan 2020, Rand Simberg wrote:
Yes, but they did have to "man rate" Redstone, Atlas, and Titan II (of
the same vintage) to put people on top. They didn't just pull one off
the assembly line...
In fairness, though, much of that was the result of the dismally bad
reliability of Atlas at the time. (Deke Slayton once said that, early in
Project Mercury, everyone expected that at least one astronaut riding an
Atlas would have to use the escape system.) Assembly-line Atlases really
were unsuited for manned flight, then. And that set the pattern -- all
subsequent launchers had to be "man-rated".
(Similarly, because Mercury obviously needed a highly-capable escape
system to fly on Atlas, subsequent manned spacecraft had to have one.
Caldwell Johnson, one of the main designers of the Apollo spacecraft,
argued that Apollo didn't need an escape tower, since it was going to fly
on a properly-designed rocket.)
And they had problems with Titan due to POGO.
Essentially all large rockets of the time had Pogo problems, of varying
severity. The Saturn V was never entirely cured of its upper-stage Pogo,
which once (Apollo 13) came within a hair's breadth of catastrophic launch
failure. Modern preference is to just automatically put a Pogo suppressor
on any large liquid-fuel engine, without waiting to see whether Pogo shows
up in flight.
Henry
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