The Orion spacecraft will have to be operated with remotes, due to the vibration environment. In addition to the introduction of a new comm failure mode (will it be IR, Bluetooth, what?) there’s the other problem noted in comments over there: “Time to deorbit. What did you do with the remote?” And all (as another commenter notes) because NASA thought it would be a dandy idea to have a huge solid first stage.
I wonder if they would even be considering this if it weren’t for the vibration problem?
Rand
Did you note the part where the astronauts arms are going to be restrained during ascent?
No, I missed that.
Geez…
They should strap Horowitz in for the first test flight.
Last but not least, crewmembers’ arms will be restrained during dynamic flight phases, necessitating an operations mode in which all crew vehicle interactions are accomplished through one or more handheld devices usable under high g loads and vibration levels. As these devices represent a form of remote control, virtually all operations with these devices require electronic interfaces.
This begs the question – should they have to abort, will the crew have the ability to command the LES to fire or will they have to depend on ground controllers and/or computers to do the job?
Sometimes I wonder whether our manned spaceflight program effectively died the day they decided Ares I was a good idea.
In software, we have a word for this: Kludge.
The negative effects of Kludges become increasingly apparent as time goes on. Superior solutions to Kludges often require re-thinking assumptions, backtracking, or abandoning existing work in order to rearchitect and refactor.
If the vibrations are so bad that their arms have to be restrained, how about their heads?
By the way, what the hell are those G loads to be that high? It was 7.5 to 8 g on the Apollo, Gemini, Mercury missions and they were able to switch switches.
Also, it is going to be too crowded to use switches? I can just imaging how much fun it would be for the crew to have a lightning strike like Apollo 13 and all the computers have to reboot!
I agree, Fred. It’s as if NASA learned nothing at all about manned rocket design from the errors made designing the shuttle. They start with one bad assumption, and then just add fixes and tweaks and patches and mitigation mechanisms and on and on and on, all trying to force a bad idea to work.
If politics were not involved in the engineering decisions, the Stick would have been abandoned within the first week of the design process.
Dennis, my crude understanding is that the thrust oscillation problem is high vibration in the 15 Hertz range (15 cycles per second). The crew will have (as far as I know) vibration dampeners in their seats, but not in their consoles. So as I see it, it becomes very difficult to have the crew do anything unless the relevant switches are on the seat right under the hand of the astronaut.
By the way, what the hell are those G loads to be that high? It was 7.5 to 8 g on the Apollo, Gemini, Mercury missions and they were able to switch switches.
Yes, but those were constant gee forces aligned along a single axis. With solid rocket motors, gee forces have random components along all three axes.
It’s like riding in a sports car vs. riding in a paint shaker. Even if the magnitude of forces is no greater, it’s a different experience.
The Orion spacecraft will have to be operated with remotes, due to the vibration environment. In addition to the introduction of a new comm failure mode (will it be IR, Bluetooth, what?)
I didn’t see anything in the article to indicate these would necessarily be wireless. In fact, the photo of the test unit shows what appears to be a cable coming out of it.
The vibration nonsense aside, this doesn’t seem all that different from the Hands On Stick And Throttle concept being used on modern fighters. Except, of course, that a fighter pilot can do more than push the eject button at the first sign of trouble.
At least they chose a good name for the device: Nostromo. Fans of the movie Alien know that nothing can go wrong with a name like that…
The “Nostromo” remote? All we need now is Sigourney Weaver and a slime spitting creature aboard the orbiter!
Just a question – I seem to recall a lot of the shuttle astronauts and Apollo astronauts commenting on the difficulty of seeing indicators and operating controls during launch (Saturn V first stage especially.) Is this really a new problem, or merely an exacerbation of an existing problem?
It’s not a new problem, but it’s also not “merely” an exacerbation of an old one. As the old saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.