spacetoday.net: Ares 1 vibration worries eased
spacetoday.net: Ares 1 vibration worries eased
Uh, yea. The vibrations aren’t strong enough to cause problems but they are looking into shock absorbers both on the engine and even on the seats. If the problems are severe enough for the seats to need vibration damping, what is gonna be the effect on EVERYTHING else thats on board? Something tells me that there is more to this that they are trying to gloss over.
The links to newspaper articles give a LOT more info on both the problem and the proposed solutions. Seems the same general type of oscillations caused one of the early unmanned Saturn V test rockets to fail.
Themocracy
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the Saturn V series was the ONLY rocket series that had no performance failures: i.e., they had failures of one or more engines, but it did not keep the rocket from achieving its planned orbit. The other engines just ran a little bit longer. I’ll look up some references and get back to you on that, but I distinctly remember a Saturn engineer talking about the “pogo” problem and the fact that all the Saturns performed to specs. Couple of the rides were a little bit rough, but no aborts.
The Ares, however, it seems like I have heard some people saying for a while now that it might be reaching the “good money after bad” area.
Well, did a little checking and the Saturn V was 13 for 13, with the only serious whoopsy being the pogoing issue, which was fixed rather early on. As one poster in a thread I viewed said, you can’t really say that the Saturn is that much more reliable than the shuttle because the shuttle has so many flights (over 100) compared to 13-in that many Saturn flights, something could turn up. Then again, a reply to that was saying that if they had used liquid fueled boosters rather than the solids, we might have made it to Columbia before an accident, and maybe not them, because of the change in flight characteristics the liquid fuel boosters would bring. That’s above my head, but who knows…rocket science, though, by its very nature, a rather touchy field and it only takes one thing to go wrong to screw the pooch, whereas most EVERYTHING has to go right for the flight to be a success.
According to the Huntsville Times article (link from article above) which is what I was going by:
The Saturn V program had a similar problem during an unmanned test launch in the late 1960s when severe vibrations caused the rocket’s destruction, Lyles said.