[AR] Re: MSR reactors.
- From: Ed Kelleher <Pres@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx,arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2019 17:10:25 -0400
At 03:56 PM 7/13/2019, William Claybaugh wrote:
Apollo was estimated at the time as having a one in five probability of loss
of crew.
A decade ago the then Constellation architecture for earth-Moon human
transport came in at about one in ten.
The initial flight of the Space Shuttle was retrospectively estimated at one
in four; the last flight at one in 63.
Bill
On Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 1:51 PM Peter Fairbrother
<<mailto:peter@xxxxxxxxxx>peter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 13/07/2019 20:42, William Claybaugh wrote:
Ed:
A fair point until one spends some time aboard a boomer and realizes
that a significant minority of those tattooed enlisted sailors hold
masterâs in nuclear engineering....
Still, the safety culture is extraordinary in my experience and much
could be learned from it even given human spaceflight being far more
inherently dangerous.
More inherently dangerous than a boomer?
Discuss...
Peter Fairbrother
Haven't been any deaths on US boomers that I know of. Thresher, Scorpion, San
Franciso were all fast attacks, doing fast attacky things. Boomers go slow and
avoid risks. When we knew a threat was in the area, we went the other way,
slowly. I made 8 patrols on a boomer. In that time one guy dropped a hatch on
his hand, another dropped a trim pump on his hand. Had one corpsman on board
and he handled them. One got infected and had to be medevaced. There's lots
of potential dangers but the training and culture keep them from becoming
problems.
Complacency was eliminated by drills. They were never scheduled and on a
submarine they *never* said, "This is a drill!" Everytime it was for real,
with one exception. Missile launch drills were either a "test" or an
"exercise".
The "culture" part was the implicit teaching of visualization, all the time.
You're in the engine room and hear water coming in, what do you do? Or you see
white gas coming from the CO H2 burner, what do you do? Or you're going to
your rack, and you see a non-qual playing with one of the torpedo detonators
(they were stored in crew berthing).
Relevance to ARocket: Amateurs don't have big organizations or people like
Rickover. Rockets are dangerous. Guns are dangerous. Machinery is dangerous.
Nuclear power plants are dangerous. The dangers can be managed and controlled,
but it takes constant work to do so effectively.
Where's Randall?
Ed Kelleher
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