Riding Rockets

Solid-fueled rocket boosters lack this significant safety advantage. Once ignited, they cannot be turned off and solid propellant cannot flow, so it cannot be diverted to another engine. At the most fundamental level, modern solid rocket boosters are no different from the first rockets launched by the Chinese thousands of years ago—after ignition they have to work because nothing can be done if they don’t. And, typically, when they do not work, the failure mode is catastrophic. The military has a long history of using solid rocket boosters on their unmanned missiles, and whenever they fail, it is almost always without warning and explosively destructive.

The SRB design for the space shuttle was even more dangerous than other solid-fueled rockets because their huge size (150 feet in length, 12 feet in diameter, 1.2 million pounds) required them to be constructed and transported in four propellant-filled segments. At Kennedy Space Center these segments would be bolted together to form the complete rocket. Each segment joint held the potential for a hot gas leak; there were four joints on each booster. Redundant rubber O-rings had to seal the SRB joints or astronauts would die.

Yet another aspect of the design of the space shuttle made the craft significantly more dangerous to fly than anything that had preceded it. It lacked an in-flight escape system. Had theAtlas rocket, which launched John Glenn, or theSaturn V rocket, which lifted Neil Armstrong and his crew, blown up in flight, those astronauts would have likely been saved by their escape systems. On top of theMercury andApollo capsules were emergency tractor escape rockets that would fire and pull the capsule away from a failing booster rocket. Parachutes would then automatically deploy to lower the capsule into the water. The astronauts riding inGemini capsules had the protection of ejection seats at low altitude and a capsule separation/parachute system for protection at higher altitudes.

The shuttle design did accommodate two ejection seats for the commander and pilot positions, but this was a temporary feature intended to protect only the two-man crews that would fly the first four shakedown missions. After these experimental flights validated the shuttle design, NASA would declare the machineoperational, remove the two ejection seats, and manifest up to ten astronauts per flight. Such large crews would be necessary to perform the planned satellite deployments and retrievals, spacewalks, and space laboratory research of the shuttle era.These crews would have no in-flight escape system whatsoever. These were the missions TFNGs were destined to fly. We would have no hope of surviving a catastrophic rocket failure, a dubious first in the history of manned spaceflight.

The lack of an escape system aboard operational space shuttles—indeed, the very idea that NASA could even apply the termoperational to a spacecraft as complex as the shuttle—was a manifestation of NASA’s post-Apollo hubris. The NASA team responsible for the design of the space shuttle was the same team that had put twelve Americans on the moon and returned them safely to Earth across a quarter million miles of space. The Apollo program represented the greatest engineering achievement in the history of humanity. Nothing else, from the Pyramids to the Manhattan Project, comes remotely close. The men and women who were responsible for the glory of Apollo had to have been affected by their success. While no member of the shuttle design team would have ever made the blasphemous claim, “We’re gods. We can do anything,” the reality was this: The space shuttle itselfwas such a statement. Mere mortals might not be able to design and safely operate a reusable spacecraft boosted by the world’s largest, segmented, uncontrollable solid-fueled rockets, but gods certainly could.

It would be more than just the unknowns of a new spacecraft that TFNGs would face. NASA’s post-Apollo mission was also uncharted territory. Having vanquished the godless commies in a race to the moon, the new NASA mission was basically a space freight service.