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Author
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Topic: Never-needed shuttle aborts: RTLS, TAL, AOA
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Henry Heatherbank
Member Posts: 244
From: Adelaide, South Australia
Registered: Apr 2005
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posted 07-09-2011 06:16 AM
  
I guess I am relieved, and a little surprised, that during the entire shuttle program, there was never a Return to Launch Site (RTLS), never a Trans-Atlantic (TAL) abort, never an Abort Once Around (AOA). Only one Abort to Orbit (ATO, 51-F, but does 93 count as two?)So the propulsion personnel would have breathed a huge sigh of relief at main engine cutoff (MECO), at the point when the shuttle program's space shuttle main engines fell silent forever. So much launch contingency planning never needed to be tested. Thankfully. |
astro-nut
Member Posts: 946
From: Washington, IL
Registered: Jan 2006
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posted 07-09-2011 08:05 AM
A very good point indeed! |
ea757grrl
Member Posts: 729
From: South Carolina
Registered: Jul 2006
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posted 07-09-2011 08:22 AM
A thousand times over, amen! |
APG85
Member Posts: 306
From:
Registered: Jan 2008
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posted 07-09-2011 09:38 AM
Beautiful engines! I hope they have the sense to preserve at least one intact... |
dabolton
Member Posts: 419
From: Seneca, IL, US
Registered: Jan 2009
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posted 07-09-2011 11:33 AM
I think they are pretty clear that the engines are remaining for future engineering and/or use on other vehicles. definitely not museum pieces at this point. |
Michael Davis
Member Posts: 528
From: Houston, Texas
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted 07-09-2011 11:56 AM
As I remember, the main engines were the primary concern for mission failure at the beginning of the program. The story was always that they were truly at the cutting edge of performance and that failures were to be expected. I recall "experts" saying that there would certainly be LOVs down the line due to their over design. It just shows you that predictions are always difficult especially when they are about the future. |
Fezman92
Member Posts: 1031
From: New Jersey, USA
Registered: Mar 2010
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posted 07-09-2011 01:35 PM
I've been tempted to go down to Atlantic City airport which is an hour from me during a shuttle launch and/or landing because the airport is one of the emergency landing area for the shuttle. Thankfully I never needed to drive down to see the shuttle. While it would have been very cool to see a shuttle that close, it would have not have been for the best of reasons. |
Jay Chladek
Member Posts: 2272
From: Bellevue, NE, USA
Registered: Aug 2007
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posted 07-09-2011 01:40 PM
Funny thing about a TAL is if it had been done, it could have been promoted as the FASTEST trans atlantic crossing ever done by a winged vehicle. It would have put Concorde and SR-71s records to shame.  |
Spaceguy5
Member Posts: 427
From: Pampa, TX, US
Registered: May 2011
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posted 07-09-2011 01:41 PM
I remember in Mike Mullane's book, the engines exploding was a fear he mentioned a few times. Even if a few exploded in ground tests early in the program, they've definitely proved their reliability. |
Cozmosis22
Member Posts: 968
From: Texas * Earth
Registered: Apr 2011
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posted 07-09-2011 02:17 PM
The original maiden launch attempt of Discovery back on June 26, 1984 was aborted due to a main engine failure. At T-6 seconds, two of the engines fired up but the third did not. They were subsequently shut down at the T-3 second mark.A little puff of steam appeared at the pad and then a loud spooky "growwwlllll" came screaming across the turning basin and up over the Press Site. "We have main engine shutdown," came over the loudspeakers and then there was utter silence. The anxiety was so thick you could cut it with a knife. That was perhaps the closest we came to a serious STS launchpad incident. |
Whizzospace
Member Posts: 110
From: San Antonio, TX
Registered: Jan 2006
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posted 07-09-2011 04:28 PM
When I worked at the Air Rescue Service detachment in Germany in the early 1990s, my Pararescue colleague was constantly on call for TAL duty. He would leave on short notice to sit in sunny Spain for a few days, just in case NASA needed his services. I think we were all ultimately glad it was just a long string of training exercises. |
Bluebird Mike
New Member Posts:
From:
Registered:
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posted 07-09-2011 05:17 PM
I would never, ever have wished it on a crew, but an RTLS abort would have been one hell of a thing to witness.  |
Henry Heatherbank
Member Posts: 244
From: Adelaide, South Australia
Registered: Apr 2005
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posted 07-09-2011 07:58 PM
Bluebird Mike, much like you a part of me always wanted to see an RTLS abort as well, provide (of course) it was successfully executed. That would have been the ultimate test of piloting the Shuttle. |
Hart Sastrowardoyo
Member Posts: 3445
From: Toms River, NJ
Registered: Aug 2000
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posted 07-09-2011 08:29 PM
When I worked in Burlington County, NJ for a newspaper, we used to also paste up our newspaper in Quark. I was reallll tempted to do a dummy front page with "Shuttle lands at McGuire AFB," complete with a photo of a shuttle landing. Never did it, for fear that it would go live and get published. |
ASCAN1984
Member Posts: 1049
From: County Down, Nothern Ireland
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 09-02-2014 12:12 PM
Found this very interesting article on RTLS abort: Just about every aspect of spaceflight harbors dangers that are both obvious and concealed. Yet, it is launch and landing that create the most white knuckles and bated breaths. These concerns are well-founded. Getting into orbit requires harnessing unfathomable quantities of volatile energy with laser beam precision. Coming home necessitates somehow dissipating a similar volume of energy within comparably narrow margins of error. As risky as those two endeavors may seem, one NASA plan for the Space Shuttle combined launch and landing into a single 25-minute ride with presumed risks that far exceeded the sum of its parts: the Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort. |
Headshot
Member Posts: 864
From: Vancouver, WA, USA
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 09-02-2014 12:56 PM
During the last one or two years before the shuttle program ended, Aviation Week & Space Technology did a fairly detailed piece about crews practicing various abort modes in the orbiter simulator. The article, which I cannot seem to locate, focused on, and gave a pretty good description of an RTLS abort.Even in the safe confines of a simulator it sounded like something way beyond an E-ticket ride. |
p51
Member Posts: 1642
From: Olympia, WA
Registered: Sep 2011
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posted 09-02-2014 01:37 PM
Chuck Yaeger once described ejecting from an airplane to be, "Committing suicide to keep yourself from being killed."A few astronauts have described the RTLS abort similarly. I got to hang around with a TAL contingency crew once. It was amazing all the stuff they had just in case. I marvelled at the resources NASA had to duplicate those efforts at every contingency site during a launch. |
garymilgrom
Member Posts: 1966
From: Atlanta, GA
Registered: Feb 2007
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posted 09-02-2014 02:46 PM
Thanks for that interesting article linked by ASCAN. Here's a quote from it: STS-1 was planned as an RTLS flight. Commander Young dissented rather poetically, "Let's not practice Russian roulette, because you may have a loaded gun there." |
Ronpur
Member Posts: 1211
From: Brandon, Fl
Registered: May 2012
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posted 09-02-2014 09:50 PM
This is a really amazing video of an RTLS simulation. Very scary actually. |
David C
Member Posts: 1015
From: Lausanne
Registered: Apr 2012
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posted 09-03-2014 02:18 AM
Very interesting, shame the resolution is so poor. |
Ronpur
Member Posts: 1211
From: Brandon, Fl
Registered: May 2012
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posted 09-03-2014 10:50 AM
Yes, but the audio is what I really enjoy, taken from a simulation before STS-26, or so it claims. |
OWL
Member Posts: 175
From: United Kingdom
Registered: Aug 2007
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posted 11-01-2014 03:04 AM
If a TAL was to take part on the Shuttle programme,what would the likely time frame be from launch to touchdown? |
Fra Mauro
Member Posts: 1587
From: Bethpage, N.Y.
Registered: Jul 2002
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posted 11-02-2014 07:03 PM
About 45 minutes. |
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