7 ms·
RIP. I have to wonder, these first missions, did the astronauts have any assurance they would make it back to earth? What was it like to say goodbye to family,
by jason_slack 10y ago
RIP.
I have to wonder, these first missions, did the astronauts have any assurance they would make it back to earth? What was it like to say goodbye to family, not knowing if you would return or not.
Am I way off here? Was this mission uncertain or did NASA have reasonable assurances?
- ProAm 10y agoThey were all test pilots, they knew what the chances were.
- astrodust 10y agoI'm sure it was presumed to be "not good" as a baseline, and coming back in one piece was a bonus.
- masklinn 10y agoPretty much. Which is the daily life of a test pilot (especially at the time, some planes were absolute death traps). They knew the engineers were trying to make things as safe as possible, but they were still sitting atop giant missiles full of stuff going kabloey if you looked at it wrong: Glenn's first orbit was launched by an Atlas LV-3B, a modified and saferized derivation of the Atlas D ICBM powered by RP1/LOX. Well to be fair RP1/LOX is fairly tame when compared with H2/LOX or Hydrazine derivatives.
- astrodust 10y agoIt's like Chuck Yeager says, any landing where you survive is a great landing, and any landing where the plane can fly again is exceptional. He flew a firecracker over the speed of sound. That thing could have easily exploded when it hit that velocity due to unpredicted aero loading. Test pilots are made of sterner stuff than just about everyone else on the planet, but they're not ignorant of the risks.
- vkou 10y agoThey all knew the risks - they were very thoroughly trained in both the science, and the engineering that went into their spacecraft - as well as their many deadly failure modes. If that didn't drive the point home, the occasional Soviet space disaster certainly would have.
- astrodust 10y agoThe occasional American disaster made it crystal clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
- vkou 10y agoThat doesn't entirely count as a space disaster as it was in training. More importantly, everyone of them expected 'You're going to burn-up and die in launch/re-entry/all your air vents in space/your engines will misfire, and you won't return home' as big, serious risks of their work. Nobody expected 'You're going to burn-up and die as a result of getting into a closed room, and pushing a few buttons', to be in their top-ten expected causes of death. Planning around unknown unknowns, and all that.
- andars 10y agoImportant to note that the "closed room" was the Command Module on top of a Saturn launch vehicle.
- vkou 10y agoYes, but AFAIK, the Saturn V was not full of fuel. Given that, the fact that the module was on top of the rocket didn't change the risk profile much. The fire could have happened, even if the command module was in a garage.
- andars 10y agoSure, but it wasn't just any room. As a sidenote, it wasn't a Saturn V.
- Bedon292 10y agoThats a good question. I would be curious what they really felt the odds were at that point in time. There definitely had to be uncertainty, but he was willing to take those risks, and I think that makes him all the braver.
- vkou 10y agoThe actual death rate among astronauts flying on the Space Shuttle was ~4%. Any fair assessment would have put the odds of death on a pre-shuttle flight to be at least that.
- Animats 10y agoAt the time of the Mercury program, the career fatality rate of military fighter pilots was around 20%, without any help from the enemy. NASA lost four astronauts flying T-38 trainers. An occasional launch didn't raise the risk much for people in that business.
- acheron 10y agoI think they were "reasonably" certain everything would work, sure. They weren't going to throw people and equipment up there on a guess. But that doesn't mean it wasn't still risky.
- Amorymeltzer 10y agoYou've got to read The Right Stuff[1], it's fantastic. Tom Wolfe paints the ethos of the era perfectly, and if you have any interest in this period, early NASA, or the guys themselves it's a must-read. I'd also recommend Chuck Yeager's autobiography[2] as another fantastic read that gives you a feel for what life was like for elite test pilots. 1: https://smile.amazon.com/Right-Stuff-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427565/ https://smile.amazon.com/Right-Stuff-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427565... 2: https://smile.amazon.com/Yeager-Autobiography-Chuck/dp/0553256742/ https://smile.amazon.com/Yeager-Autobiography-Chuck/dp/05532...
- jason_slack 10y agoThanks for sharing these.
- bernardom 10y agoThe other classic (and definitely an HN-appropriate book) is "Failure Is Not an Option," which gives an awesome look at the engineering and management challenges they faced from Mercury to Apollo. https://smile.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/dp/1439148813 https://smile.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/...
- Amorymeltzer 10y agoAbsolutely!
- photogrammetry 10y agoThe title, it should be disclaimed, is not what the astronauts or flight controllers believed. It's a poor abbreviation of the following: "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz#.22Failure_is_not_an_option.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz#.22Failure_is_not_a...
- andars 10y ago
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoYou are not off base. The first Russian cosmonaut in space died on reentry. Apollo one burnt on the pad. Apollo 13, well, it got a movie. And that's just of the top of my head, sitting in traffic.
- nawitus 10y agoNo, the first cosmonaut was Yuri Gagarin.
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoOK, I looked it up. Aren't red lights wonderful. It was Vladimir Komarov in '67. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov
- cyberferret 10y agoKomarov's was particularly sad. He knew he was going to die, and railed at the incompetence of the program engineers during the descent phase that he knew he wouldn't survive. The fact that the main problem was that the parachute straps had been hooked up wrongly was the final (preventable) insult to a brave man. "Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight." Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears. On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. Golovanov called this behavior "a sudden caprice," though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. The Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board. Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn't open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day's launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov's chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast. All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn't make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov's wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying."
- anigbrowl 10y agoThey did not, and that is precisely what makes them heroic.
- mikeash 10y agoThey're still quite uncertain. The most recent time somebody didn't make it back was less than 14 years ago, and it'll happen many times in the future unless there's a sudden halt to manned spaceflight. What's really interesting to me are how little they really knew about the basics. Stuff like the rocket and the heat shield are pretty obvious, but for example they had no way to be sure that humans could even survive being in orbit at all. They sent animals first so they had some confidence, but they couldn't really be sure until they tried it.
- jdavis703 10y agoThere are rumors that the Soviet space program actually sent several humans to space before Yuri Gagarin became the first man to be sent into space and make it back alive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts). The USSR was known to send cosmonauts on known doomed missions, for instance Gagarin tried to volunteer for one mission knowing the government wouldn't risk killing a national -- and world -- hero and hoped they would cancel the mission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1.
- vkou 10y agoAs per the article, these rumours are unsubstantiated. There are also rumours that America never landed on the moon. The USSR was not making a habit of mindlessly sending cosmonauts on certain-to-be-doomed missions. They did have immense political pressure to make a launch on time, and hope for the best. Note that of the many design defects Soyuz-1 had, only one of them killed Komarov. Almost everything else worked out 'fine'. They wouldn't have sent him if he had no chance of returning alive. Soyuz-1 was a wake-up call that this culture wasn't good enough.
- billforsternz 10y agoThey had five nines safety. Well, in the sense that Wernher von Braun asked each of his lieutenants in turn whether they could think of any reason the rocket wouldn't work, and the reply went "nein, nein, nein, nein, nein". Wish I could remember the source of this joke.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoI would be very surprised if _any_ astronaut feels assured they will come home. I'm sure they don't talk about it much, but there's got to be that little voice telling them there's a chance... And yet, they still go.
- WalterBright 10y agoHistory is full of people knowingly taking such risks. For example, my father was a B17 navigator. 80% of the group he went to England with became casualties. He was convinced he would not survive his tour due to the inevitable mathematics of the B-17 loss rate. But he went anyway.
- WalterBright 10y agoI just read that Glenn flew 149 combat missions, including ones where he got his plane back home all shot up. He had no shortage of bravery and willingness to take huge risks.
- rmason 10y agoJohn Glenn was known to his flying buddies as 'old iron ass' for his ability to always bring back a shot up plane safely. He took heavy hits to his aircraft a dozen times. He kept a Cessna, flying it until his 90th birthday.
- wallace_f 10y agoThat is an interesting thing to think about. By contrast, I witnessed a young person who was afraid to pull over to the side of the road to help a stranger with a broken down car. I know these two are not a perfect comparison, but I can't help but think our culture has changed since then. That's just intuition -- could be right or wrong.