1 00:00:09,050 --> 00:00:16,010 There were a couple of areas that have been discussed a little bit, which I wanted to 2 00:00:16,010 --> 00:00:22,480 elaborate on because I think it is significant. 3 00:00:22,480 --> 00:00:27,119 One of them relates to intact aborts. 4 00:00:27,119 --> 00:00:33,320 The question of a crew escape system and whether that should be automated, whether the crew 5 00:00:33,320 --> 00:00:38,460 should have control and what is required if you actually have the crew take control. 6 00:00:38,460 --> 00:00:45,460 I think Chris Kraft gave an interesting perspective with the idea that because of the difficulties, 7 00:00:49,690 --> 00:00:56,690 or given the requirements, really, the impossibility of incorporating a capsule escape system for 8 00:00:57,960 --> 00:01:04,959 the Shuttle, the project basically took the point of view that the Shuttle itself was 9 00:01:06,280 --> 00:01:12,400 the escape pod, which means that you have to recover the Shuttle intact regardless of 10 00:01:12,400 --> 00:01:13,840 any engine failures. 11 00:01:13,840 --> 00:01:20,370 Now that, of course, requires 100% reliability of the solid rocket boosters which we never 12 00:01:20,370 --> 00:01:24,980 did achieve with Challenger. 13 00:01:24,980 --> 00:01:30,020 Although, of course, had we operated it within its spec limits it might be another story. 14 00:01:30,020 --> 00:01:36,520 But, in any case, I want to go through some of the details of a return to launch site 15 00:01:36,520 --> 00:01:43,520 abort and then I will describe an incident which occurred on our last flight to give 16 00:01:45,380 --> 00:01:52,289 you an idea of what is involved in the actual operation of abort modes. 17 00:01:52,289 --> 00:01:59,180 The idea is you have the two solid rocket boosters which have to light. 18 00:01:59,180 --> 00:02:00,690 And they are going to perform no matter what. 19 00:02:00,690 --> 00:02:06,460 If one of those boosters doesn't light and the other does it is a bad day. 20 00:02:06,460 --> 00:02:07,290 What can you say? 21 00:02:07,290 --> 00:02:13,030 And, obviously, if one of them fails during flight it is a bad day. 22 00:02:13,030 --> 00:02:20,030 And, which was more of a design problem, if they don't tail off at just the identical 23 00:02:21,530 --> 00:02:28,530 rate so that you get asymmetric thrust greater than a certain capability of the Shuttle to 24 00:02:28,560 --> 00:02:30,810 control, you have had a bad day. 25 00:02:30,810 --> 00:02:37,810 And because of the requirement to have symmetric thrust, I don't think if this was discussed 26 00:02:38,420 --> 00:02:44,760 before, when the solid rocket boosters are poured, they mix a batch of propellant sort 27 00:02:44,760 --> 00:02:47,720 of like you mix bread dough. 28 00:02:47,720 --> 00:02:54,720 And then they pour the propellant into both the left and the right booster segments at 29 00:02:54,829 --> 00:03:01,510 the same time so each booster segment has the identical batch of propellant in it. 30 00:03:01,510 --> 00:03:05,990 It may not be the same from the bottom to the top, but it is the same from the left 31 00:03:05,990 --> 00:03:06,810 to the right. 32 00:03:06,810 --> 00:03:08,850 And that is critical. 33 00:03:08,850 --> 00:03:13,950 And then they always reserve a certain proportion of the propellant. 34 00:03:13,950 --> 00:03:20,950 And they do tests on that to make sure that there are no process control problems. 35 00:03:23,209 --> 00:03:26,220 OK. 36 00:03:26,220 --> 00:03:31,410 You still need the three main engines to have enough thrust. 37 00:03:31,410 --> 00:03:38,180 The boosters each give you about 2.5 million pounds thrust, so that is about five million 38 00:03:38,180 --> 00:03:40,310 pounds to get off the ground. 39 00:03:40,310 --> 00:03:45,680 These give you about a half a million pound thrust at vacuum, four hundred and some odd 40 00:03:45,680 --> 00:03:49,230 thousand pounds thrust, so still over a million pounds thrust. 41 00:03:49,230 --> 00:03:55,880 And, of course, the problem you have during first stage is you have big gravity losses. 42 00:03:55,880 --> 00:04:02,880 The Shuttle on the pad weighs about 5.5 million pounds with all the propellant. 43 00:04:03,130 --> 00:04:08,709 If you don't fire your main engines you are barely going to lift off the ground. 44 00:04:08,709 --> 00:04:12,620 Actually, I guess it is a little bit less than five million pounds. 45 00:04:12,620 --> 00:04:19,620 But, in any case, without the three main engines firing you don't have enough thrust to get 46 00:04:21,349 --> 00:04:21,728 into orbit. 47 00:04:21,728 --> 00:04:28,729 Now, remember we talked about for deorbit burn, normally we fire both OMS engines. 48 00:04:30,599 --> 00:04:35,900 If one of the OMS engines is out you can fire one engine for twice as long. 49 00:04:35,900 --> 00:04:41,710 Or, if they are both out, you can fire the four RCS thrusters for twice as long again. 50 00:04:41,710 --> 00:04:48,110 Because you are in orbit, you are weightless, you don't have gravity losses, so firing half 51 00:04:48,110 --> 00:04:52,169 as many engines for twice as long is completely equivalent. 52 00:04:52,169 --> 00:04:54,499 When you are taking off against gravity that is not true. 53 00:04:54,499 --> 00:04:59,949 I mean if you only have five million pounds of thrust for a five million pound payload 54 00:04:59,949 --> 00:05:02,979 you are just going to sit on the pad and burn all your fuel. 55 00:05:02,979 --> 00:05:03,449 OK. 56 00:05:03,449 --> 00:05:07,139 You need your three engines. 57 00:05:07,139 --> 00:05:14,139 And, in fact, another interesting point, the attachment between the external tank and the 58 00:05:14,610 --> 00:05:21,610 Shuttle, that is stressed to assume that you have at least one engine burning. 59 00:05:23,289 --> 00:05:29,990 They tell me that if the Shuttle took off with just the solid boosters and you didn't 60 00:05:29,990 --> 00:05:36,710 have any thrust, sort of keeping the Shuttle up with the external tank, that the structural 61 00:05:36,710 --> 00:05:37,979 attachment points would fail. 62 00:05:37,979 --> 00:05:41,249 Anyway, you need your engines. 63 00:05:41,249 --> 00:05:47,569 What happens if you lose an engine early on? 64 00:05:47,569 --> 00:05:54,569 If you are far enough into the launch, you are over the main gravity loss segment usually 65 00:05:54,740 --> 00:05:58,659 starting at about 3.5 to 4 minutes into launch. 66 00:05:58,659 --> 00:06:05,339 If you lose one engine you can make it over the ocean, And that is called a Trans-Atlantic 67 00:06:05,339 --> 00:06:05,830 Abort. 68 00:06:05,830 --> 00:06:10,779 And, when you do that, you are basically flying upside down. 69 00:06:10,779 --> 00:06:16,639 You will do a roll maneuver, drop your external tank and come in and land. 70 00:06:16,639 --> 00:06:23,639 And you are basically going in the same direction which is nice when you are flying a rocket. 71 00:06:24,369 --> 00:06:26,119 These things are hard to turn around. 72 00:06:26,119 --> 00:06:30,259 But if you are going to do a return to launch site abort that is exactly what you have to 73 00:06:30,259 --> 00:06:31,219 do. 74 00:06:31,219 --> 00:06:38,219 So, this is a procedure that has been analyzed to death in many, many computer simulations. 75 00:06:39,949 --> 00:06:45,099 The basic procedure is you take off and you lose an engine. 76 00:06:45,099 --> 00:06:52,099 Now, it doesn't matter when you lose an engine in the first 2.5 minutes. 77 00:06:52,889 --> 00:06:56,909 You don't do anything while the solid rocket boosters are firing. 78 00:06:56,909 --> 00:07:00,779 They basically have open loop guidance. 79 00:07:00,779 --> 00:07:07,149 There is a certain projector programmed in and you cannot readjust that trajectory with 80 00:07:07,149 --> 00:07:12,389 a closed loop guidance solution to accommodate for any sort of a malfunction. 81 00:07:12,389 --> 00:07:14,969 So, you don't even declare an RTLS abort. 82 00:07:14,969 --> 00:07:21,969 And that, by the way, is done by the crew punching a button which essentially is a protected 83 00:07:22,710 --> 00:07:24,389 button. 84 00:07:24,389 --> 00:07:25,490 You punch that. 85 00:07:25,490 --> 00:07:31,069 And you can also do it via a computer input if something goes wrong with the button. 86 00:07:31,069 --> 00:07:34,569 You declare an RTLS abort after SRB separation. 87 00:07:34,569 --> 00:07:41,249 Immediately what happens is your trajectory increases because you want to gain altitude, 88 00:07:41,249 --> 00:07:42,899 and you will see why in a minute. 89 00:07:42,899 --> 00:07:49,899 But what happens now is you've got a pretty hefty downrange velocity already and you have 90 00:07:51,550 --> 00:07:54,879 got to turn around and come back. 91 00:07:54,879 --> 00:08:01,879 You have also got to worry about the disposal of your external tank. 92 00:08:02,179 --> 00:08:07,300 If you turn around and you come back, you are still burning your engines, you are still 93 00:08:07,300 --> 00:08:12,399 riding your tank, and you don't want the tank coming down on Melbourne or Disney World or 94 00:08:12,399 --> 00:08:13,860 anything like that. 95 00:08:13,860 --> 00:08:15,679 The basic procedure is as follows. 96 00:08:15,679 --> 00:08:22,679 You are going out, you loft your trajectory a bit, once you get far enough out now what 97 00:08:26,339 --> 00:08:28,969 you do is you do a powered pitch around. 98 00:08:28,969 --> 00:08:32,029 A very sporty maneuver. 99 00:08:32,029 --> 00:08:34,210 The external tank is here. 100 00:08:34,210 --> 00:08:41,210 Now you are flying backwards into your plume and everybody has speculated on what that 101 00:08:41,299 --> 00:08:44,049 would actually look like. 102 00:08:44,049 --> 00:08:47,930 Now you are flying backwards decelerating. 103 00:08:47,930 --> 00:08:51,440 And, as you decelerate, of course, gravity is starting to push you down so you've got 104 00:08:51,440 --> 00:08:58,440 to increase your pitch velocity until finally you basically have no more horizontal velocity 105 00:08:59,750 --> 00:09:05,730 and are just sitting statically on top of your exhaust. 106 00:09:05,730 --> 00:09:12,459 And now you gradually pitch forward and you start to fly back. 107 00:09:12,459 --> 00:09:18,810 Again, you have got to plan your trajectory so that when you drop the tank it is going 108 00:09:18,810 --> 00:09:20,649 to come down in the ocean. 109 00:09:20,649 --> 00:09:26,220 And then, if all that goes well, now you enter the heading alignment circle. 110 00:09:26,220 --> 00:09:33,180 And, of course, you are a heavy weight vehicle because you also, in the process of the RTLS, 111 00:09:33,180 --> 00:09:39,130 dump your OMS tanks and your RCS propellant so that you want to make sure you are as light 112 00:09:39,130 --> 00:09:39,829 as possible. 113 00:09:39,829 --> 00:09:46,829 Plus, in case you have any problem with landing you don't want your hypergolic propellant 114 00:09:47,649 --> 00:09:49,190 tanks to rupture. 115 00:09:49,190 --> 00:09:54,769 If all that goes well, now you enter the heading alignment circle and you have hopefully a 116 00:09:54,769 --> 00:09:56,209 nominal landing. 117 00:09:56,209 --> 00:10:03,209 As I say, this has been analyzed in high-fidelity dynamic simulations. 118 00:10:04,399 --> 00:10:07,180 The crew practices it over and over again. 119 00:10:07,180 --> 00:10:09,690 Everybody knows the procedures. 120 00:10:09,690 --> 00:10:16,370 Nobody wants to be the first crew to try this out. 121 00:10:16,370 --> 00:10:22,750 Before STS-1, you remember we talked about how there were lots of problems with the tiles 122 00:10:22,750 --> 00:10:24,459 falling off. 123 00:10:24,459 --> 00:10:30,209 I remember one of the people very high up in NASA, I don't remember if it was the administrator 124 00:10:30,209 --> 00:10:36,879 or one of the deputies, suggested that maybe the safest thing to do would be to do a planned 125 00:10:36,879 --> 00:10:43,250 RTLS because an RTLS, of course, you don't get up to those high velocities. 126 00:10:43,250 --> 00:10:44,870 And so you don't have any thermal problems. 127 00:10:44,870 --> 00:10:50,360 And so if a whole bunch of tiles had fallen off on the launch pad you could safely do 128 00:10:50,360 --> 00:10:51,579 an RTLS. 129 00:10:51,579 --> 00:10:58,000 Well, obviously, they did not appreciate the difficulties of doing an RTLS and that suggestion 130 00:10:58,000 --> 00:10:59,100 was not taken up. 131 00:10:59,100 --> 00:11:06,100 We basically decided we were not going to fly until we had confidence that the tiles 132 00:11:07,639 --> 00:11:10,069 were going to stay on. 133 00:11:10,069 --> 00:11:17,069 Cut forward to February of 1996, which was my fifth and final Shuttle flight. 134 00:11:17,379 --> 00:11:22,779 I was the second flight engineer so I was sitting right behind the pilot who is responsible 135 00:11:22,779 --> 00:11:24,170 for the main engine performance. 136 00:11:24,170 --> 00:11:31,170 Now, I should tell you, we have had, in the course of the 114 Shuttle flights we have 137 00:11:31,399 --> 00:11:35,899 had four pad shutdowns, pad aborts. 138 00:11:35,899 --> 00:11:38,430 And I think we talked about that briefly. 139 00:11:38,430 --> 00:11:45,430 The main engines turn on six seconds before the solids. 140 00:11:45,500 --> 00:11:47,420 Just reviewing that does two things. 141 00:11:47,420 --> 00:11:53,860 It gives the engines time to come up to full thrust and then you can perform checks on 142 00:11:53,860 --> 00:11:59,430 them to make sure that they are operating properly before you commit yourself to flight. 143 00:11:59,430 --> 00:12:05,689 And, of course, it gives time, because of the asymmetric thrust, for what we call the 144 00:12:05,689 --> 00:12:10,040 "twang" that the whole Shuttle stack goes forward and then back. 145 00:12:10,040 --> 00:12:12,589 And then, when you get to the vertical, you light the boosters. 146 00:12:12,589 --> 00:12:17,980 In fact, when they had the first test firing on the pad before STS-1, one of the reasons 147 00:12:17,980 --> 00:12:24,009 that they wanted to do that, in addition to just confirming that everything was working 148 00:12:24,009 --> 00:12:27,399 right, is they really wanted precise timing on the twang. 149 00:12:27,399 --> 00:12:31,089 People had calculated it, but that is not something you want to get wrong. 150 00:12:31,089 --> 00:12:37,709 So, they wanted an experimental verification. 151 00:12:37,709 --> 00:12:44,709 Of the four pad shutdowns, two of them were caused by instrumentation and two of them 152 00:12:45,139 --> 00:12:46,899 were real engine problems. 153 00:12:46,899 --> 00:12:52,230 I remember the first one was the last flight before what would have been my first flight 154 00:12:52,230 --> 00:12:56,720 back in 1984. 155 00:12:56,720 --> 00:13:01,050 And the main engine cutoff is called MECO. 156 00:13:01,050 --> 00:13:07,170 So, 8.5 minutes into the flight. 157 00:13:07,170 --> 00:13:14,170 After they had a pad abort the flight engineer called to Mission Control we have MECO, somehow 158 00:13:16,800 --> 00:13:18,529 I thought we would be a little bit higher. 159 00:13:18,529 --> 00:13:25,319 And, of course, when that happens now you've got to pull all the engines out, take them 160 00:13:25,319 --> 00:13:30,779 back to the shop, bring in new engines and it is about a two or three week stand down. 161 00:13:30,779 --> 00:13:32,149 And the crew has to go back to Houston. 162 00:13:32,149 --> 00:13:36,160 And, of course, all of your friends and family are there and they have to go home. 163 00:13:36,160 --> 00:13:38,670 It is no fun. 164 00:13:38,670 --> 00:13:40,939 I mean nobody complains if it is safe. 165 00:13:40,939 --> 00:13:47,939 We're sitting on the pad, we're counting down and everything was on schedule. 166 00:13:49,379 --> 00:13:54,139 In fact, the first of my five flights it had zero problems, zero delays. 167 00:13:54,139 --> 00:13:58,240 We were going on the day that was predicted on the time. 168 00:13:58,240 --> 00:14:02,949 Countdown to six seconds. 169 00:14:02,949 --> 00:14:04,220 You can feel the engines. 170 00:14:04,220 --> 00:14:05,339 Everything starts to rumble. 171 00:14:05,339 --> 00:14:07,800 The engines start up. 172 00:14:07,800 --> 00:14:14,800 There is what we call a steam gage, a vertical bar which shows the engine power. 173 00:14:17,579 --> 00:14:19,319 Center and right engines come up to 100%. 174 00:14:19,319 --> 00:14:22,850 The left engine comes up to 40%. 175 00:14:22,850 --> 00:14:24,699 The pilot calls out left engine at 40%. 176 00:14:24,699 --> 00:14:30,220 In times like this, your mind is working pretty fast. 177 00:14:30,220 --> 00:14:37,220 I remember thinking to myself oh, damn, we are going to have a pad shutdown, we have 178 00:14:38,629 --> 00:14:43,800 got to go back to Houston and back to the simulators. 179 00:14:43,800 --> 00:14:47,800 I mean stupid things to be thinking about at that time, but that is sort of the way 180 00:14:47,800 --> 00:14:48,310 it works. 181 00:14:48,310 --> 00:14:51,689 And all of a sudden kaboom. 182 00:14:51,689 --> 00:14:54,730 I feel this big kick in my back. 183 00:14:54,730 --> 00:14:56,269 The solids have lit. 184 00:14:56,269 --> 00:14:57,699 What in the hell is going on? 185 00:14:57,699 --> 00:14:59,589 We were supposed to have a pad abort. 186 00:14:59,589 --> 00:15:04,490 Now we are going with an engine. 187 00:15:04,490 --> 00:15:11,490 And, actually, when you are going through maximum dynamic pressure, max q, the engines 188 00:15:12,470 --> 00:15:15,310 throttle down to about 65%. 189 00:15:15,310 --> 00:15:19,480 And there is a malfunction if one of your engines gets stuck it is called getting stuck 190 00:15:19,480 --> 00:15:21,019 in the thrust bucket. 191 00:15:21,019 --> 00:15:25,199 If it doesn't come back to full power you are RTLS abort. 192 00:15:25,199 --> 00:15:29,180 Well, we were taking off with one engine at 40%. 193 00:15:29,180 --> 00:15:36,180 It sort of dawned on me that we were going to be the first crew to do an RTLS, so at 194 00:15:39,829 --> 00:15:42,249 that point I start going through my checklists. 195 00:15:42,249 --> 00:15:49,249 And the pilot calls to the ground we have ignition, left engine at 40%. 196 00:15:50,550 --> 00:15:57,550 And so, for about the first 15 seconds or so, I just had barely time to get out the 197 00:15:57,829 --> 00:16:01,029 RTLS checklist and start getting ready to read the procedures. 198 00:16:01,029 --> 00:16:06,459 And then it turns out that the ground has more insight than the crew does. 199 00:16:06,459 --> 00:16:12,670 And it turns out that there are several sensors, one of which feeds that gauge. 200 00:16:12,670 --> 00:16:15,670 But, in fact, that sensor had gone bad. 201 00:16:15,670 --> 00:16:20,899 And, in fact, the left engine was performing nominally and the ground was able to confirm 202 00:16:20,899 --> 00:16:26,209 that both by the other sensors and by looking at the acceleration. 203 00:16:26,209 --> 00:16:29,470 And so, everything was OK, I put away the checklist and enjoyed the ride. 204 00:16:29,470 --> 00:16:34,300 But, first of all, it was kind of a scary situation. 205 00:16:34,300 --> 00:16:36,029 But it also shows the difficulty. 206 00:16:36,029 --> 00:16:43,029 Now, suppose we, as the crew, had been responsible for declaring an abort. 207 00:16:44,069 --> 00:16:50,990 If you are going to build in a system where this is the crew's responsibility then you 208 00:16:50,990 --> 00:16:57,850 better design your instrumentation so that the crew has all the instrumentation required 209 00:16:57,850 --> 00:17:01,059 to make that decision correctly. 210 00:17:01,059 --> 00:17:08,059 Similarly, if this were to be an automatic abort, you've got to have failure detection, 211 00:17:12,069 --> 00:17:17,109 identification, reconfiguration. 212 00:17:17,109 --> 00:17:24,050 The last thing you want is to go into an abort situation when you don't have to because there 213 00:17:24,050 --> 00:17:31,050 is no way that an abort is going to be anywhere near as safe as a nominal mission. 214 00:17:38,090 --> 00:17:40,740 Obviously, it's just a good story now. 215 00:17:40,740 --> 00:17:47,740 But I think it does have something to inform about how you are going to have to design 216 00:17:48,680 --> 00:17:49,840 abort systems. 217 00:17:49,840 --> 00:17:56,840 And, as both Aaron Cohen and Chris Kraft said, although the astronauts always felt comfortable 218 00:17:59,440 --> 00:18:04,340 with their abort system but I am not sure that all the people in Mission Control were 219 00:18:04,340 --> 00:18:08,510 quite so comfortable knowing the things that might go wrong with it. 220 00:18:08,510 --> 00:18:15,510 And, in fact, as he said, they always breathe a sigh of relief after first stage when the 221 00:18:15,920 --> 00:18:20,290 abort rocket would detach and fire itself away. 222 00:18:20,290 --> 00:18:20,750 Yeah. 223 00:18:20,750 --> 00:18:27,750 If one of the engines is not working or not working properly, I guess the other two engines 224 00:18:28,880 --> 00:18:32,240 try to do the work [NOISE OBSCURES]. 225 00:18:32,240 --> 00:18:38,060 Well, they certainly will throttle up to 109% if they need to, but they cannot make up for 226 00:18:38,060 --> 00:18:42,540 the first engine when you're in the first stage and you have lots of gravity losses. 227 00:18:42,540 --> 00:18:49,540 In fact, when you get, like I said, to about 3.5, 4 minutes then you have enough altitude 228 00:18:52,390 --> 00:18:54,670 and downrange velocity to make it across. 229 00:18:54,670 --> 00:19:01,670 And then at some point you get to the situation where you basically gained your altitude. 230 00:19:02,440 --> 00:19:07,630 And, although you are not at orbital velocity yet so you still have some gravity losses, 231 00:19:07,630 --> 00:19:14,630 the gravity losses are small enough that if you have a loss of an engine you can still 232 00:19:15,260 --> 00:19:17,280 make it to a lower orbit. 233 00:19:17,280 --> 00:19:21,250 That is called abort to orbit, ATO. 234 00:19:21,250 --> 00:19:28,250 And you will hear the call press to ATO means that you can now make it to a lower orbit 235 00:19:30,630 --> 00:19:33,520 which is the safest thing to do with two engines. 236 00:19:33,520 --> 00:19:39,120 And then a little bit later on you will hear like single engine TAL which means if you 237 00:19:39,120 --> 00:19:43,120 lose two engines with only one engine you can make it across the Atlantic. 238 00:19:43,120 --> 00:19:48,140 And then later on you will hear single engine ATO and then finally single engine. 239 00:19:48,140 --> 00:19:52,300 Then you will also hear press to MECO which means at this point if you lose an engine 240 00:19:52,300 --> 00:19:54,230 you can make it through your nominal orbit. 241 00:19:54,230 --> 00:19:59,560 And usually about the last call a single engine press to MECO which means even if you lose 242 00:19:59,560 --> 00:20:02,880 two engines you can still make it to MECO. 243 00:20:02,880 --> 00:20:09,880 What happens then if there 244 00:20:21,110 --> 00:20:23,520 is an instrumentation problem [NOISE OBSCURES]? 245 00:20:23,520 --> 00:20:30,520 The crew will never declare an abort on their own because it is just realized that the ground 246 00:20:31,910 --> 00:20:33,140 has so much more information. 247 00:20:33,140 --> 00:20:36,330 The only exception is if you lose comm. 248 00:20:36,330 --> 00:20:41,210 If we had lost comm. 249 00:20:41,210 --> 00:20:48,210 and we saw our engine at 40%, I mean there were a few other displays which the pilot 250 00:20:48,390 --> 00:20:50,180 was starting to call up. 251 00:20:50,180 --> 00:20:56,110 And it could be that he would have figured it out perhaps, perhaps not, but that is the 252 00:20:56,110 --> 00:21:00,840 only circumstance under which the crew would make that call. 253 00:21:00,840 --> 00:21:04,230 There was abort at some stage. 254 00:21:04,230 --> 00:21:06,120 What happened to that? 255 00:21:06,120 --> 00:21:08,180 Did they manage to make it [OVERLAPPING VOICES]? 256 00:21:08,180 --> 00:21:09,490 I was trying to remember. 257 00:21:09,490 --> 00:21:12,840 Did I talk about that in class? 258 00:21:12,840 --> 00:21:19,840 Well, all right, I will run through that because it was, again, a very interesting story. 259 00:21:19,950 --> 00:21:25,790 The things that you are afraid about is that if things go back in a hurry in an engine 260 00:21:25,790 --> 00:21:27,580 that an engine can actually blow up. 261 00:21:27,580 --> 00:21:30,930 And it is one thing if an engine gets shutdown. 262 00:21:30,930 --> 00:21:32,690 Now you are just flying on two engines. 263 00:21:32,690 --> 00:21:38,950 But if an engine blows up and takes out your whole rear section you have had a bad day. 264 00:21:38,950 --> 00:21:45,950 The instrumentation is biased towards an early shutdown. 265 00:21:46,220 --> 00:21:50,070 If you sense that something has gone wrong shut it down. 266 00:21:50,070 --> 00:21:53,660 We have got intact aborts. 267 00:21:53,660 --> 00:21:59,700 Better to err on the side of safety, even if that might potentially put you into an 268 00:21:59,700 --> 00:22:00,710 abort situation. 269 00:22:00,710 --> 00:22:07,710 And I am trying to exactly reconstruct it. 270 00:22:08,860 --> 00:22:15,860 The thing is that if you lose one engine now you are abort ATO. 271 00:22:19,650 --> 00:22:26,650 Now, if you lose a second engine you might be in a situation where certainly you cannot 272 00:22:28,470 --> 00:22:30,410 make it to orbit. 273 00:22:30,410 --> 00:22:34,950 And, because you have changed your trajectory, you might not be able to make it to a good 274 00:22:34,950 --> 00:22:37,220 Trans-Atlantic landing site. 275 00:22:37,220 --> 00:22:44,220 So, at that point, if you have lost one engine there is a switch on the center console where 276 00:22:48,600 --> 00:22:52,040 you can override the engine shutdown command. 277 00:22:52,040 --> 00:22:59,040 What you are now saying is we are in an unsurvivable situation if we only have one engine. 278 00:23:00,230 --> 00:23:07,230 And, therefore, we will take the extra chance of getting an instrumentation caused engine 279 00:23:07,720 --> 00:23:08,300 shutdown. 280 00:23:08,300 --> 00:23:14,110 We are not going to take that chance so we are going to disable the ability of instrumentation 281 00:23:14,110 --> 00:23:18,530 to shut down the engine and we will just take our chances. 282 00:23:18,530 --> 00:23:21,240 The ground will continue the calculation. 283 00:23:21,240 --> 00:23:25,570 And, as soon as you get to the point where you have the capability of doing a single 284 00:23:25,570 --> 00:23:31,840 engine TAL or a single engine abort to orbit, you re-enable the instrumentation. 285 00:23:31,840 --> 00:23:38,840 What happened is the Shuttle launched. 286 00:23:40,990 --> 00:23:47,860 It must have been about 4 or 5 minutes into launch because they lost an engine, it shut 287 00:23:47,860 --> 00:23:54,860 down automatically, they are now abort to orbit lower orbit, but they were abort to 288 00:23:55,150 --> 00:23:56,240 orbit. 289 00:23:56,240 --> 00:23:59,970 Take the switch, put it to inhibit. 290 00:23:59,970 --> 00:24:05,420 Now, the main propulsion flight controller was very good. 291 00:24:05,420 --> 00:24:12,420 She realized right away that it was an instrumentation problem because sometimes you can see certain 292 00:24:12,710 --> 00:24:17,090 trends or you see things change in a way that tells you that this is not the way a real 293 00:24:17,090 --> 00:24:21,720 engine behaves, that this is more typical of instrumentation. 294 00:24:21,720 --> 00:24:24,910 She suspected she had an instrumentation problem. 295 00:24:24,910 --> 00:24:30,910 Now they get a little further along in the launch where they could have potentially done 296 00:24:30,910 --> 00:24:37,850 -- They were too far to land in the normal TAL sites which were in the daytime on the 297 00:24:37,850 --> 00:24:44,550 West Coast of Africa, but they could have made a nighttime landing at some emergency 298 00:24:44,550 --> 00:24:49,380 airport in the Congo, I think it was, if they had lost another engine. 299 00:24:49,380 --> 00:24:56,380 But, by the flight rules, they take the switch back to enable so that now, because you can 300 00:24:58,410 --> 00:25:05,410 "safely" lose a second engine you want to protect yourself against an explosive situation. 301 00:25:05,580 --> 00:25:07,640 So, now they are enabled. 302 00:25:07,640 --> 00:25:13,400 Now the flight controller sees that the instrumentation on one of the other two engines is starting 303 00:25:13,400 --> 00:25:16,910 to go back the way the first one was. 304 00:25:16,910 --> 00:25:23,440 And she realized that in about 15 seconds that engine was going to shut down so she 305 00:25:23,440 --> 00:25:29,820 immediately called the flight director and said flight, take the switch back to inhibit. 306 00:25:29,820 --> 00:25:35,790 And this is where the discipline becomes very important, luckily flight didn't get into 307 00:25:35,790 --> 00:25:40,940 a long involved discussion about why do you want to do that, what is going on, but just 308 00:25:40,940 --> 00:25:46,160 said CAPCOM engine switch to inhibit. 309 00:25:46,160 --> 00:25:47,270 They took it. 310 00:25:47,270 --> 00:25:51,570 And sure enough the instrumentation went bad but the engine was OK. 311 00:25:51,570 --> 00:25:53,400 They got to orbit. 312 00:25:53,400 --> 00:25:56,640 Then they used some of their OMS propellant to raise their orbit a little bit. 313 00:25:56,640 --> 00:25:58,490 That was a Spacelab mission. 314 00:25:58,490 --> 00:26:00,100 And they had a good mission. 315 00:26:00,100 --> 00:26:06,360 But the flight controller actually won a big award for that because she really saved the 316 00:26:06,360 --> 00:26:08,380 day. 317 00:26:08,380 --> 00:26:13,430 So, yeah, that is the closest we ever came to a real intact abort. 318 00:26:13,430 --> 00:26:14,070 Yeah. 319 00:26:14,070 --> 00:26:15,340 Two questions. 320 00:26:15,340 --> 00:26:20,340 The first one is going back to the return to launch site. 321 00:26:20,340 --> 00:26:22,880 Do all of the main engine propellant get used up before the tank gets dropped or do you 322 00:26:22,880 --> 00:26:26,820 not burn some of the propellant? 323 00:26:26,820 --> 00:26:28,270 You know, I don't know the answer to that. 324 00:26:28,270 --> 00:26:28,970 I don't. 325 00:26:28,970 --> 00:26:34,740 And the other one is on the pad, with your flight, wouldn't the sequencing computer shut 326 00:26:34,740 --> 00:26:37,400 down the other engines if it detected that one of them had failed? 327 00:26:37,400 --> 00:26:40,600 And so it must have used the good sensor. 328 00:26:40,600 --> 00:26:42,250 Yeah, that is right. 329 00:26:42,250 --> 00:26:47,210 And, luckily, our little gauge was just fed by one. 330 00:26:47,210 --> 00:26:51,440 And, in retrospect, you can say probably that's not a good way to design it but that is the 331 00:26:51,440 --> 00:26:52,100 way it was designed. 332 00:26:52,100 --> 00:26:52,850 You're right. 333 00:26:52,850 --> 00:26:59,450 If the engine controller senses with a majority or however they program it, I don't know the 334 00:26:59,450 --> 00:27:01,390 details of the guts of the software there. 335 00:27:01,390 --> 00:27:05,530 But if it is convinced that one of the engines is not working right it shuts down all three 336 00:27:05,530 --> 00:27:10,620 engines, which is what happened on four occasions. 337 00:27:10,620 --> 00:27:11,020 Yeah. 338 00:27:11,020 --> 00:27:18,020 When you talked about the forced pitch over in the return to launch site, was that just 339 00:27:21,900 --> 00:27:22,280 the gambling of the main engines that gives you that? 340 00:27:22,280 --> 00:27:23,770 Yeah, because you are off the solids at that point. 341 00:27:23,770 --> 00:27:24,700 And that is the thing. 342 00:27:24,700 --> 00:27:31,310 I mean with the solids there is such an enormous thrust and the aerodynamic loads are huge. 343 00:27:31,310 --> 00:27:35,500 You don't want to deviate from your planned trajectory because one of the things that 344 00:27:35,500 --> 00:27:40,980 they do is program in load relief for the aerodynamic surfaces. 345 00:27:40,980 --> 00:27:44,590 They take the day of winds launch. 346 00:27:44,590 --> 00:27:51,090 And, if you have wind shears or other atmospheric high jet streams that you are going to fly 347 00:27:51,090 --> 00:27:58,090 through, they actually program the elevons and the body flap to move in such a way as 348 00:27:58,790 --> 00:28:01,860 to relieve the aerodynamic loading on the wings. 349 00:28:01,860 --> 00:28:03,880 And that is preprogrammed in. 350 00:28:03,880 --> 00:28:05,950 It is not a closed loop. 351 00:28:05,950 --> 00:28:11,100 It is totally open loop so you don't want to change the trajectory once you've put all 352 00:28:11,100 --> 00:28:11,920 that load relief in. 353 00:28:11,920 --> 00:28:16,330 How long does that take? 354 00:28:16,330 --> 00:28:17,640 It's pretty quick. 355 00:28:17,640 --> 00:28:20,620 It's about ten seconds, if I remember from the simulator. 356 00:28:20,620 --> 00:28:25,270 It is a sporty maneuver, I will tell you. 357 00:28:25,270 --> 00:28:26,510 No RCS that goes into that? 358 00:28:26,510 --> 00:28:31,560 Oh, the RCS is trivial compared to what you're getting out. 359 00:28:31,560 --> 00:28:35,810 You've got 500,000 pounds coming out of each engine. 360 00:28:35,810 --> 00:28:42,810 The primary RCS is 750 pounds. 361 00:28:46,240 --> 00:28:51,630 But, like I said, they do then open up the RCS as you are flying back. 362 00:28:51,630 --> 00:28:56,510 And what they do is they open up all the engines so that you have symmetrical thrusts so that 363 00:28:56,510 --> 00:29:01,010 you are firing out of both sides. 364 00:29:01,010 --> 00:29:07,740 The idea is just to deplete the tanks as much as possible. 365 00:29:07,740 --> 00:29:14,740 The second technical area that I had been hoping that Al Louviere would get into and 366 00:29:16,620 --> 00:29:21,470 didn't have a chance to was the payload bay doors which are a fascinating mechanism. 367 00:29:21,470 --> 00:29:28,470 And it is also going to be a segue into EVA because it was a strange situation. 368 00:29:30,160 --> 00:29:34,700 It is kind of relate back to that now when you look at how many successful EVAs have 369 00:29:34,700 --> 00:29:39,650 been done and the Hubble repair and the building of Space Station and all the other things, 370 00:29:39,650 --> 00:29:46,650 but management at Johnson Space Center was not particularly friendly to EVA back in the 371 00:29:50,920 --> 00:29:51,830 `70s. 372 00:29:51,830 --> 00:29:55,480 I asked Chris Kraft about that. 373 00:29:55,480 --> 00:29:57,100 At first he denied it. 374 00:29:57,100 --> 00:29:59,320 He said well, I always liked EVA. 375 00:29:59,320 --> 00:30:04,510 He said well, maybe it was the management of the Astronaut Office that didn't like EVA. 376 00:30:04,510 --> 00:30:08,750 He did admit that Bob Gilruth who was the Director of Johnson Space Center at the time, 377 00:30:08,750 --> 00:30:14,620 this was when Chris Kraft was head of flight operations, definitely did not like EVA. 378 00:30:14,620 --> 00:30:15,350 He was afraid of it. 379 00:30:15,350 --> 00:30:22,350 He didn't think it was safe, despite the fact that back in 1973 EVA had saved the entire 380 00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:26,060 Skylab project. 381 00:30:26,060 --> 00:30:27,540 Hopefully most of you know that story. 382 00:30:27,540 --> 00:30:30,730 I know it is ancient history. 383 00:30:30,730 --> 00:30:37,530 And clearly we had done a lot of safe EVAs on the surface of the Moon, but basically 384 00:30:37,530 --> 00:30:44,530 EVA was looked at it was expensive, it was potentially hazardous. 385 00:30:44,860 --> 00:30:51,120 Given the things that the Shuttle was supposed to do in the original planning, mainly launch 386 00:30:51,120 --> 00:30:57,140 satellites, launch pieces of the Space Station, that went away, Launch Defense Department 387 00:30:57,140 --> 00:31:04,140 satellites, commercial satellites, EVA was not really part of the big picture in planning. 388 00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:11,160 And, although they did design an airlock for the Shuttle, there were real questions of 389 00:31:15,120 --> 00:31:17,170 how much preparation do we have to do for EVA? 390 00:31:17,170 --> 00:31:18,380 Do we really even need it? 391 00:31:18,380 --> 00:31:25,380 Maybe we could save some weight by not having space suits aboard. 392 00:31:39,990 --> 00:31:46,990 That is 393 00:32:02,030 --> 00:32:03,100 where we finally ended up. 394 00:32:03,100 --> 00:32:05,310 That is the Hubble Telescope. 395 00:32:05,310 --> 00:32:08,600 This is the side of the payload bay. 396 00:32:08,600 --> 00:32:11,930 I mean, obviously, EVA became a very successful activity. 397 00:32:11,930 --> 00:32:15,340 These are the payload bay doors. 398 00:32:15,340 --> 00:32:20,430 This is in the orbiter processing facility. 399 00:32:20,430 --> 00:32:27,430 And one of the things, well, I have a picture of closing the door. 400 00:32:28,730 --> 00:32:33,220 But the mechanism of these doors is extraordinary. 401 00:32:33,220 --> 00:32:38,480 There are two motors, one at the front and one at the back of each. 402 00:32:38,480 --> 00:32:44,810 Each of the motors has two drive units and they work through a differential so that if 403 00:32:44,810 --> 00:32:51,810 one of the motors fails the other one can still drive although at half the speed, just 404 00:32:52,270 --> 00:32:55,610 similar to the way a car works. 405 00:32:55,610 --> 00:33:00,740 There is a long torsion rod which runs the length of the Shuttle. 406 00:33:00,740 --> 00:33:05,130 And then that torsion rod is attached to these bars over here. 407 00:33:05,130 --> 00:33:11,510 And I am sorry the picture was scanned in and is not terribly sharp. 408 00:33:11,510 --> 00:33:18,510 As the torsion bar twists then these rods lift up the payload bay door and bring it 409 00:33:20,070 --> 00:33:21,250 to a close. 410 00:33:21,250 --> 00:33:26,090 The mechanism, this is the best picture I could find, you notice there is a strong back 411 00:33:26,090 --> 00:33:32,390 because, as was mentioned, the doors cannot support their own weight in 1G. 412 00:33:32,390 --> 00:33:39,390 But the system of latches here, you have to remember that the payload bay can expand and 413 00:33:39,520 --> 00:33:45,440 contract by several inches due to thermal environment. 414 00:33:45,440 --> 00:33:52,440 And so you have to design a latch system that can accommodate this thermal behavior. 415 00:33:53,930 --> 00:33:56,950 It was an incredible mechanical challenge. 416 00:33:56,950 --> 00:34:02,400 And the complexity of this system, I mean I am always amazed when I look at how the 417 00:34:02,400 --> 00:34:02,930 thing works. 418 00:34:02,930 --> 00:34:09,399 I have a schematic of them later, which you can look at, but basically you close the doors. 419 00:34:09,399 --> 00:34:14,280 And then the first thing you do is you want to close the latches on either end. 420 00:34:14,280 --> 00:34:16,349 And then there is also center line latches. 421 00:34:16,349 --> 00:34:22,239 And I think Al Louviere did discuss the fact that these payload bay doors are part of the 422 00:34:22,239 --> 00:34:26,399 structural element of the Shuttle during reentry. 423 00:34:26,399 --> 00:34:32,000 You cannot reenter if the doors are not just closed by latched. 424 00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:35,820 You need them latched for structural strength. 425 00:34:35,820 --> 00:34:42,820 There is a series of bollards here, little protrusions which these latches grab on. 426 00:34:44,330 --> 00:34:51,330 And they have designed the rigging of the rods such that the latches that are close 427 00:34:56,149 --> 00:35:02,420 to the hinge line actually close before the latches that are further away. 428 00:35:02,420 --> 00:35:09,100 It is a sequential closing of the latches all with a single mechanism so that basically 429 00:35:09,100 --> 00:35:16,100 you pull the part of the door that is closest to the torque rod, you latch that down first, 430 00:35:17,230 --> 00:35:21,510 and then it is kind of a zipper effect where then you pull it down so that even if the 431 00:35:21,510 --> 00:35:26,660 door is a little bit warped thermally you will get the door to close properly. 432 00:35:26,660 --> 00:35:33,660 You wouldn't want to close this latch first and then have the door in a situation where 433 00:35:33,720 --> 00:35:37,010 it was buckled out. 434 00:35:37,010 --> 00:35:41,180 And then, of course, the center line latch, because of the thermal expansion, you can 435 00:35:41,180 --> 00:35:44,480 have the doors coming together like that or like that. 436 00:35:44,480 --> 00:35:47,580 And you have got to have centerline latches that can accommodate for that. 437 00:35:47,580 --> 00:35:51,260 It is really quite an incredible design. 438 00:35:51,260 --> 00:35:55,520 And Al Louviere had said that he was going to talk about it, but he didn't have time 439 00:35:55,520 --> 00:35:59,270 to. 440 00:35:59,270 --> 00:36:04,380 There is plenty of redundancy in here because there are these double motors, but because 441 00:36:04,380 --> 00:36:11,380 this is so critical people started to look at suppose you have some degree stuck in the 442 00:36:11,850 --> 00:36:18,230 mechanism, it doesn't matter how many motors, you cannot get it closed. 443 00:36:18,230 --> 00:36:22,570 Suppose the motors jam on one side. 444 00:36:22,570 --> 00:36:25,600 Now the other motor is not going to be able to drive it. 445 00:36:25,600 --> 00:36:30,500 So, various things were done to allow for EVA intervention. 446 00:36:30,500 --> 00:36:34,600 And, in the early Shuttle flights, this was the only thing that the crew trained for with 447 00:36:34,600 --> 00:36:39,370 EVA, it was just payload bay door contingencies. 448 00:36:39,370 --> 00:36:46,370 For instance, the PDU, the drive unit, this is the payload bay door drive unit or PLBDU. 449 00:36:50,750 --> 00:36:54,230 That is what we call a nested acronym. 450 00:36:54,230 --> 00:36:56,730 That is part of the game there. 451 00:36:56,730 --> 00:37:00,760 You have to go out and actually peel away the liners of the payload bay. 452 00:37:00,760 --> 00:37:07,760 And inside here there is a little mechanism where you can insert a special tool and twist 453 00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:09,680 it. 454 00:37:09,680 --> 00:37:16,680 And that actually disconnects that motor drive unit from the torque so that it can turn freely. 455 00:37:19,560 --> 00:37:24,790 And I hope, when you look at these things, you will get some sense of the complexity 456 00:37:24,790 --> 00:37:26,680 of these mechanisms. 457 00:37:26,680 --> 00:37:33,680 And so what we do for training -- Of course they build mockups of this in the water and 458 00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:38,490 we also look at the real Shuttle down in Florida to actually see these units. 459 00:37:38,490 --> 00:37:42,890 And, for the people who are on the EVA crew, you spend a lot of time crawling around the 460 00:37:42,890 --> 00:37:47,810 payload bay getting intimately familiar with a lot of the actual mechanisms just in case 461 00:37:47,810 --> 00:37:54,810 you actually have to go out and do something with it. 462 00:37:54,880 --> 00:38:01,880 Then suppose the problem is not with the drive unit but that one of these latches get jammed 463 00:38:03,290 --> 00:38:03,860 up. 464 00:38:03,860 --> 00:38:06,350 This is actually a tube cutter. 465 00:38:06,350 --> 00:38:08,100 It is a little hard to see. 466 00:38:08,100 --> 00:38:11,690 I don't know if you are familiar with the things. 467 00:38:11,690 --> 00:38:12,480 They are on a ratchet. 468 00:38:12,480 --> 00:38:18,790 And, as it gradually cuts, you push the blade in bit by bit. 469 00:38:18,790 --> 00:38:20,500 And then eventually you cut away. 470 00:38:20,500 --> 00:38:27,280 And this gives you an idea that they just gave us a lot of tools, a pin extractor, a 471 00:38:27,280 --> 00:38:31,220 crowbar, vice grips, you name it. 472 00:38:31,220 --> 00:38:34,000 How much did that crowbar cost? 473 00:38:34,000 --> 00:38:38,660 Well, the crowbar probably cost about $10 at Sears. 474 00:38:38,660 --> 00:38:45,660 And then they had to put on all of the Velcro and the tethers to go in the tool thing, and 475 00:38:45,690 --> 00:38:47,860 that probably cost a few hundred dollars. 476 00:38:47,860 --> 00:38:50,890 And then they had to make a drawing of it, and you know how it goes. 477 00:38:50,890 --> 00:38:56,250 EVA is very expensive because everything has to be custom made. 478 00:38:56,250 --> 00:39:03,180 I mean that is one of the things that, because of the constraints of the suits and the gloves, 479 00:39:03,180 --> 00:39:07,750 you cannot, in most case, just use regular tools. 480 00:39:07,750 --> 00:39:10,300 And, as I say, everything is tethered. 481 00:39:10,300 --> 00:39:11,650 And I will show you pictures later. 482 00:39:11,650 --> 00:39:13,070 We have a little mini workstation. 483 00:39:13,070 --> 00:39:18,500 They built little receptacles on the side of the suit because it is a hard upper torso 484 00:39:18,500 --> 00:39:20,270 which can take a certain amount of load. 485 00:39:20,270 --> 00:39:25,310 And so you plug basically a tool caddy into your suit. 486 00:39:25,310 --> 00:39:28,800 And then you hang all of these tools on the tool caddy. 487 00:39:28,800 --> 00:39:35,070 And you will see some pictures later of how that works. 488 00:39:35,070 --> 00:39:42,070 If the motors don't work and you have now freed the doors so that the door can move 489 00:39:42,630 --> 00:39:49,630 but you have no motor to drive it, now we have a mechanical winch and a rope on it. 490 00:39:49,920 --> 00:39:55,750 And I'm not making this up. 491 00:39:55,750 --> 00:39:56,990 You actually run the rope up. 492 00:39:56,990 --> 00:40:00,820 These are the little bollards that the latches catch onto. 493 00:40:00,820 --> 00:40:06,030 You run the rope up over that and then you have to crawl out on the payload bay door, 494 00:40:06,030 --> 00:40:09,760 which would be a lot of fun, and attach it here. 495 00:40:09,760 --> 00:40:13,570 And then you actually wind it closed. 496 00:40:13,570 --> 00:40:14,750 And we do this in the water. 497 00:40:14,750 --> 00:40:16,840 I mean this is all fully mocked up. 498 00:40:16,840 --> 00:40:17,820 Yeah. 499 00:40:17,820 --> 00:40:23,090 What do you do if you have trouble opening the doors just after launch? 500 00:40:23,090 --> 00:40:28,630 Well, if you cannot open the doors then you come home. 501 00:40:28,630 --> 00:40:29,470 You wouldn't want to. 502 00:40:29,470 --> 00:40:33,400 I mean if there was something seriously wrong with the doors you better come home. 503 00:40:33,400 --> 00:40:38,180 Yeah, we can do this to get them closed. 504 00:40:38,180 --> 00:40:42,050 But you don't want to purposely put yourself in that situation if you know you have a problem 505 00:40:42,050 --> 00:40:43,530 beforehand. 506 00:40:43,530 --> 00:40:45,010 Yeah. 507 00:40:45,010 --> 00:40:47,980 [NOISE OBSCURES] 508 00:40:47,980 --> 00:40:50,180 We think it could be done with one person. 509 00:40:50,180 --> 00:40:51,730 Normally, we only go out with two. 510 00:40:51,730 --> 00:40:56,920 But in the orbital flight test, the first four flights only had two crew members. 511 00:40:56,920 --> 00:41:02,440 Was of them was EVA trained. 512 00:41:02,440 --> 00:41:07,750 And then what happens if you get the doors closed by the latches don't latch? 513 00:41:07,750 --> 00:41:13,570 They actually made latches that we could put on by hand. 514 00:41:13,570 --> 00:41:14,990 These are the latches for the side. 515 00:41:14,990 --> 00:41:21,560 And this is the schematic that sort of show the latches going on the orders in that order 516 00:41:21,560 --> 00:41:23,820 one, two, three and four. 517 00:41:23,820 --> 00:41:28,920 And, again, the way they designed this so that they actually close in sequence but you 518 00:41:28,920 --> 00:41:34,890 only have one drive unit is really just a beautiful mechanical system. 519 00:41:34,890 --> 00:41:41,320 But if they don't close then you take this, and I won't go into the details, but you have 520 00:41:41,320 --> 00:41:44,460 to spring it around at least two of those. 521 00:41:44,460 --> 00:41:48,460 And that will give you the structural strength to come home. 522 00:41:48,460 --> 00:41:54,510 And then if the center line latches don't close, again, you can look at the mechanism 523 00:41:54,510 --> 00:41:54,760 here. 524 00:41:54,670 --> 00:41:56,490 And they have yet a different tool. 525 00:41:56,490 --> 00:42:01,580 Now, this is actually shown on its side, but this is actually on the top. 526 00:42:01,580 --> 00:42:06,860 And this is a bitch in the water because, yeah, your suit is weightless but the tool 527 00:42:06,860 --> 00:42:07,740 is not. 528 00:42:07,740 --> 00:42:10,920 And so you are holding this tool. 529 00:42:10,920 --> 00:42:15,060 When you're holding the tool you want to sink to the bottom, and so you are trying to hold 530 00:42:15,060 --> 00:42:15,770 on with one hand. 531 00:42:15,770 --> 00:42:22,740 And you have a tether so you try to tie yourself to the top there so that you're kind of hanging 532 00:42:22,740 --> 00:42:23,300 on the tether. 533 00:42:23,300 --> 00:42:30,050 But then, depending on how your weigh out is, if you move this big tool back and forth 534 00:42:30,050 --> 00:42:32,680 your body is sort of rocking back and forth. 535 00:42:32,680 --> 00:42:36,390 And you are working above your head. 536 00:42:36,390 --> 00:42:39,510 I mean everybody has to do it. 537 00:42:39,510 --> 00:42:45,430 If you are going to be an EVA crew member and you cannot do this job you are disqualified. 538 00:42:45,430 --> 00:42:47,670 But nobody likes it. 539 00:42:47,670 --> 00:42:51,650 It is a real pain. 540 00:42:51,650 --> 00:42:56,010 That is basically how EVA got sold to the Shuttle System. 541 00:42:56,010 --> 00:43:02,140 I will show you a few pictures of general EVA activities to give you an idea of how 542 00:43:02,140 --> 00:43:03,150 the system works. 543 00:43:03,150 --> 00:43:10,150 And then I want to go into the question of the interaction between EVA and the pressurization 544 00:43:14,210 --> 00:43:18,560 and the environmental control system of the rest of the Shuttle because, again, this is 545 00:43:18,560 --> 00:43:20,050 a systems engineering problem. 546 00:43:20,050 --> 00:43:26,440 And you cannot, in most cases, do one thing without it having an impact on something else. 547 00:43:26,440 --> 00:43:31,369 I talked about doing all this training. 548 00:43:31,369 --> 00:43:37,780 Now we are stepping ten years into the future so that is training for the Hubble Telescope. 549 00:43:37,780 --> 00:43:43,540 And, actually, the telescope is so tall that we couldn't get the whole thing in. 550 00:43:43,540 --> 00:43:48,970 The pool wasn't deep enough so we had to actually cut it in half, and we would work on one half 551 00:43:48,970 --> 00:43:54,530 and then work on the other half. 552 00:43:54,530 --> 00:43:55,180 Here is an example. 553 00:43:55,180 --> 00:43:59,650 This is me installing the Wide Field/Planetary Camera. 554 00:43:59,650 --> 00:44:06,650 Now, the training, people normally see the water tank. 555 00:44:10,180 --> 00:44:11,130 You're not weightless. 556 00:44:11,130 --> 00:44:13,150 You all understand that. 557 00:44:13,150 --> 00:44:15,990 If you go upside down the blood rushes to your head. 558 00:44:15,990 --> 00:44:20,710 If you're holding onto tools, the tools will fall down. 559 00:44:20,710 --> 00:44:25,460 And of course you don't have these guys when you're out in space. 560 00:44:25,460 --> 00:44:32,460 Angels if you saw them out in space. 561 00:44:32,890 --> 00:44:39,890 If you're moving around large objects, they have resistance from the water, so you need 562 00:44:40,760 --> 00:44:45,940 to get a sense of how easy it is to push things around so you don't get things moving too 563 00:44:45,940 --> 00:44:46,630 fast. 564 00:44:46,630 --> 00:44:50,770 We also train on air bearing floors. 565 00:44:50,770 --> 00:44:55,930 This is a mass model of the Wiff-Pick. 566 00:44:55,930 --> 00:45:00,400 The same mass, moments of inertia. 567 00:45:00,400 --> 00:45:04,430 And I am up here on a weight relief system. 568 00:45:04,430 --> 00:45:08,220 And you can really get a sense of what it feels like. 569 00:45:08,220 --> 00:45:13,310 And so you are trying to build a kind of muscle memory so that when you get in space you are 570 00:45:13,310 --> 00:45:19,480 not trying to push things as hard as you push them in the water. 571 00:45:19,480 --> 00:45:23,980 And you also remember that if you want to stop something you also have to be able to 572 00:45:23,980 --> 00:45:25,040 exert a force on it. 573 00:45:25,040 --> 00:45:31,000 Whereas, in the water, all you have to do is stop pushing. 574 00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:33,970 Now we go into space and we are ready for the EVA. 575 00:45:33,970 --> 00:45:40,750 I will sort of take you through what is involved to give you a sense of the complexity of this 576 00:45:40,750 --> 00:45:43,470 system. 577 00:45:43,470 --> 00:45:46,450 First of all are tools. 578 00:45:46,450 --> 00:45:49,970 That is what I looked like before all the cosmic rays made my hair fall out. 579 00:45:49,970 --> 00:45:54,520 It is just one of the hazards of spaceflight. 580 00:45:54,520 --> 00:45:56,770 Here you see the kind of tool caddies. 581 00:45:56,770 --> 00:46:00,940 This is for a ratchet wrench. 582 00:46:00,940 --> 00:46:04,230 And we had about 250 different tools. 583 00:46:04,230 --> 00:46:08,280 About a hundred planned to use and the rest were for contingencies. 584 00:46:08,280 --> 00:46:10,440 And we had to take them all out. 585 00:46:10,440 --> 00:46:12,980 We call this our fish stringer. 586 00:46:12,980 --> 00:46:15,540 Sort of like a Portuguese fishermen. 587 00:46:15,540 --> 00:46:19,780 The fisher wives hang all the fish on the string and then hang them out. 588 00:46:19,780 --> 00:46:25,740 And then we take this out on the fish stringer. 589 00:46:25,740 --> 00:46:29,110 This is the airlock at launch. 590 00:46:29,110 --> 00:46:31,290 And it is totally packed. 591 00:46:31,290 --> 00:46:35,560 And, in fact, we had four spacesuits rather than the normal two so there wasn't a whole 592 00:46:35,560 --> 00:46:36,240 lot of room. 593 00:46:36,240 --> 00:46:41,619 And the first thing is you go and you start checking the various systems. 594 00:46:41,619 --> 00:46:48,619 And then you have to unpack everything and move it into the flight deck. 595 00:46:48,880 --> 00:46:49,650 That is Story. 596 00:46:49,650 --> 00:46:53,230 We went out together. 597 00:46:53,230 --> 00:46:55,450 This is the hard upper torso. 598 00:46:55,450 --> 00:47:01,750 This is looking down into the inside of the spacesuit. 599 00:47:01,750 --> 00:47:08,410 The back of the spacesuit there is battery and lithium hydroxide CO2 scrubber. 600 00:47:08,410 --> 00:47:12,850 The CO2 scrubber has to be replaced after every EVA. 601 00:47:12,850 --> 00:47:16,980 It is good for about 12 hours. 602 00:47:16,980 --> 00:47:22,350 And normally if you're only going out once you don't worry about recharging the batteries, 603 00:47:22,350 --> 00:47:28,660 but since we were doing successive every day EVAs we would have to take the batteries out 604 00:47:28,660 --> 00:47:29,800 every night and charge them. 605 00:47:29,800 --> 00:47:32,990 Take the ones that had been charged and put them into the suits that are going to go out 606 00:47:32,990 --> 00:47:34,200 the next day. 607 00:47:34,200 --> 00:47:39,470 And just keeping track of which cartridges have been used and which batteries have been 608 00:47:39,470 --> 00:47:46,470 charged and how much, I mean there is a tremendous amount of overhead effort just in managing 609 00:47:46,780 --> 00:47:48,890 all of this equipment. 610 00:47:48,890 --> 00:47:55,890 And we had practiced doing this a lot on the ground, as you can imagine, before we went 611 00:47:56,540 --> 00:47:57,350 up. 612 00:47:57,350 --> 00:48:00,150 The morning of the EVA. 613 00:48:00,150 --> 00:48:06,140 You get up early and eat as big a breakfast as you can because you are not going to get 614 00:48:06,140 --> 00:48:09,330 much to eat for the next eight hours. 615 00:48:09,330 --> 00:48:12,710 These are radiation monitors. 616 00:48:12,710 --> 00:48:17,100 For Hubble we were actually up at about 600 kilometers, which is as high as the Shuttle 617 00:48:17,100 --> 00:48:24,100 ever goes, so we got really the highest radiation dose that you can get on the Shuttle on a 618 00:48:25,320 --> 00:48:25,920 normal mission. 619 00:48:25,920 --> 00:48:30,930 It was about between one and two REMs which is no big health problem. 620 00:48:30,930 --> 00:48:37,930 But typically the dose on a Shuttle flight at a more typical 300 kilometers is more like 621 00:48:38,480 --> 00:48:43,590 tens or maybe a little over 100 milliREMs. 622 00:48:43,590 --> 00:48:45,930 They did want us to take the radiation monitor. 623 00:48:45,930 --> 00:48:47,460 Now we are in the mid-deck. 624 00:48:47,460 --> 00:48:52,690 And when you see these pictures you get a sense of when you're doing an EVA the entire 625 00:48:52,690 --> 00:48:55,190 middeck is just full of stuff. 626 00:48:55,190 --> 00:48:58,580 I mean there is so much equipment. 627 00:48:58,580 --> 00:49:05,580 You've got the pants units floating over there, plus the two extra suits and all of the auxiliary 628 00:49:05,640 --> 00:49:06,530 equipment. 629 00:49:06,530 --> 00:49:09,730 You try to keep things organized. 630 00:49:09,730 --> 00:49:16,730 Then for thermal control, the original Apollo spacesuits were designed for daytime use on 631 00:49:20,020 --> 00:49:21,980 the Moon when it is very hot. 632 00:49:21,980 --> 00:49:26,880 And, in addition, people are walking so they are putting a lot of metabolic heat into the 633 00:49:26,880 --> 00:49:27,550 suit. 634 00:49:27,550 --> 00:49:33,080 And so they were very concerned about being able to have sufficient cooling. 635 00:49:33,080 --> 00:49:38,080 They developed a very, very efficient sublimator cooling unit. 636 00:49:38,080 --> 00:49:45,080 You have a little layer of ice that is continually fed from the bottom and it is sublimates. 637 00:49:45,160 --> 00:49:46,820 That basically is how you get rid of your heat. 638 00:49:46,820 --> 00:49:51,900 And then you run your cooling water underneath that ice and it cools off. 639 00:49:51,900 --> 00:49:58,050 And then it is run through what they call LCVG, liquid cooling and ventilation garment 640 00:49:58,050 --> 00:50:05,050 which has lots of Tygon tubing that goes through it so that it carries the cold water next 641 00:50:05,950 --> 00:50:06,550 to your skin. 642 00:50:06,550 --> 00:50:13,550 And also the oxygen that comes into the suit comes through the helmet over the back of 643 00:50:14,500 --> 00:50:18,920 your head so it flows over your face so you breathe the fresh oxygen. 644 00:50:18,920 --> 00:50:25,920 But you would like to get ventilation through the entire suit so you don't build up lots 645 00:50:26,640 --> 00:50:28,950 of humidity in your arms and legs. 646 00:50:28,950 --> 00:50:34,600 What you do is the return valve actually comes through these air ducts. 647 00:50:34,600 --> 00:50:40,420 And so the return is picked up at the bottom of your arms and at the bottom of your legs. 648 00:50:40,420 --> 00:50:45,580 That insures that the air does get circulated through your arms and legs. 649 00:50:45,580 --> 00:50:52,580 But when we started doing Shuttle EVAs metabolically you are not nearly as stressed. 650 00:50:54,390 --> 00:51:01,340 Plus, you spend almost half your time in the dark and it gets really, really cold. 651 00:51:01,340 --> 00:51:08,340 And this has been a constant problem. 652 00:51:09,350 --> 00:51:14,630 And here is an interesting systems problem to show how everything relates to one another. 653 00:51:14,630 --> 00:51:20,420 We were very concerned about when you open up the doors of the Hubble Telescope, if direct 654 00:51:20,420 --> 00:51:27,420 sunlight comes in, it will cause an out-gassing of the internal material which could pollute 655 00:51:28,720 --> 00:51:30,170 the ultraviolet mirrors. 656 00:51:30,170 --> 00:51:37,170 The ultraviolet optics are very, very sensitive to organic contamination, so under no circumstances 657 00:51:37,970 --> 00:51:42,500 could we have sunlight penetrating the interior of the telescope. 658 00:51:42,500 --> 00:51:47,300 But we were going to be spending a lot of time with the doors open, so how do you insure 659 00:51:47,300 --> 00:51:50,340 that you will never get the sun coming in? 660 00:51:50,340 --> 00:51:56,619 Well, the Hubble Telescope is sitting up here like this. 661 00:51:56,619 --> 00:52:01,900 If that is the sun, just make sure that the belly of the orbiter is always pointed towards 662 00:52:01,900 --> 00:52:02,290 the sun. 663 00:52:02,290 --> 00:52:06,800 Then you never have to worry about sun coming into the telescope. 664 00:52:06,800 --> 00:52:13,170 But what you do have to worry about is that, well, during the dayside of your orbit, if 665 00:52:13,170 --> 00:52:18,030 the sun is over here and the earth is over here, during the day your payload bay is going 666 00:52:18,030 --> 00:52:19,580 to be pointed towards the earth. 667 00:52:19,580 --> 00:52:25,960 And so, you basically have a radiative heat exchange with something that is at about 20 668 00:52:25,960 --> 00:52:26,750 degrees C. 669 00:52:26,750 --> 00:52:27,350 No big deal. 670 00:52:27,350 --> 00:52:33,220 If you go around the other side now, you at nighttime, you're pointed at deep space. 671 00:52:33,220 --> 00:52:37,450 And so you're radiating towards absolute zero or three degrees Kelvin. 672 00:52:37,450 --> 00:52:40,290 And that is a concern. 673 00:52:40,290 --> 00:52:41,260 And you get very cold. 674 00:52:41,260 --> 00:52:48,260 They were predicting temperatures of as much as 150 below zero Celsius. 675 00:52:49,580 --> 00:52:55,480 We were very concerned not only were our hands going to get cold but some of our tools might 676 00:52:55,480 --> 00:52:57,980 not work. 677 00:52:57,980 --> 00:53:04,980 We pushed very hard for a test in a thermal vacuum chamber. 678 00:53:05,050 --> 00:53:10,020 Our tools are stored in a toolbox outside in the cargo bay. 679 00:53:10,020 --> 00:53:15,210 And we wanted to go through going out and taking the tools out. 680 00:53:15,210 --> 00:53:22,210 And, of course, they are held in there because they have launch locks so there are little 681 00:53:22,290 --> 00:53:27,940 pit pins and latching mechanisms that you have to remove so that you can get the tools 682 00:53:27,940 --> 00:53:28,850 out. 683 00:53:28,850 --> 00:53:30,619 I went in to do the first test. 684 00:53:30,619 --> 00:53:32,320 And it is a vacuum chamber. 685 00:53:32,320 --> 00:53:33,520 And the walls are painted black. 686 00:53:33,520 --> 00:53:38,450 And they can run liquid nitrogen through the vacuum chamber. 687 00:53:38,450 --> 00:53:42,790 And they could cool it down to the lowest temperatures that we were expecting to experience. 688 00:53:42,790 --> 00:53:49,790 I opened up the toolbox and about 75% of the tools the launch release mechanisms were just 689 00:53:50,840 --> 00:53:51,570 frozen shut. 690 00:53:51,570 --> 00:53:52,980 I couldn't get them out. 691 00:53:52,980 --> 00:53:55,510 So, that started to get people's attention. 692 00:53:55,510 --> 00:53:59,820 They sent the engineers in to redo some of the tolerance. 693 00:53:59,820 --> 00:54:04,220 They played around with the lubrication a little bit. 694 00:54:04,220 --> 00:54:11,220 Then Story went in a week later to do his run and he was able to get most of the tools 695 00:54:12,490 --> 00:54:12,990 out. 696 00:54:12,990 --> 00:54:19,030 I think he got all the tools out, actually, because I was only in for a few hours. 697 00:54:19,030 --> 00:54:21,830 Because once we realized that it wasn't working I came out. 698 00:54:21,830 --> 00:54:24,790 He was in there. 699 00:54:24,790 --> 00:54:29,660 I remember he said at one point just holding onto these tools my hands are really, really 700 00:54:29,660 --> 00:54:30,160 cold. 701 00:54:30,160 --> 00:54:31,470 I don't know. 702 00:54:31,470 --> 00:54:33,920 About an hour or so later someone asked him how his hands were. 703 00:54:33,920 --> 00:54:36,369 He said oh, they are fine, they've warmed up. 704 00:54:36,369 --> 00:54:39,750 Well, Story is from the South. 705 00:54:39,750 --> 00:54:44,920 Those of you with experience in winter know that if your hands are really cold and after 706 00:54:44,920 --> 00:54:48,920 a while you don't feel them anymore, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have warmed up. 707 00:54:48,920 --> 00:54:53,510 When they took him out of the chamber his hands were deep purplish black and he had 708 00:54:53,510 --> 00:55:00,510 severe frostbite to the point where they sent him up to Alaska to some frostbite specialists. 709 00:55:01,790 --> 00:55:03,160 In the end, he was very fortunate. 710 00:55:03,160 --> 00:55:07,190 He got off with no major permanent damage and was able to fly. 711 00:55:07,190 --> 00:55:10,700 But, as you can imagine, that got serious management attention. 712 00:55:10,700 --> 00:55:14,270 So, gloves now have electrical heating units in them. 713 00:55:14,270 --> 00:55:17,080 But we didn't have that available. 714 00:55:17,080 --> 00:55:24,080 What we had to do was to change the attitude profile so that we were basically pointing 715 00:55:25,090 --> 00:55:26,750 towards the earth. 716 00:55:26,750 --> 00:55:29,730 Now, that is generally OK. 717 00:55:29,730 --> 00:55:35,470 If you are pointing towards the earth and the sun is coming from your belly you are 718 00:55:35,470 --> 00:55:42,470 not going to hurt the Shuttle, but a quarter way around the earth you do have the possibility 719 00:55:44,430 --> 00:55:49,540 now that the sun is going to hit the telescope. 720 00:55:49,540 --> 00:55:56,540 What they had to do was to do two attitude maneuvers every orbit in order to basically 721 00:56:02,260 --> 00:56:05,580 keep us in a more benign thermal attitude for the EVA. 722 00:56:05,580 --> 00:56:12,349 But to prevent the sun from shinning on the telescope. 723 00:56:12,349 --> 00:56:17,040 And we didn't the reaction control system propellant budget to support that. 724 00:56:17,040 --> 00:56:20,910 Remember we were going into a high orbit which meant we needed to use a lot of OMS fuel to 725 00:56:20,910 --> 00:56:21,990 get up there? 726 00:56:21,990 --> 00:56:26,599 And we needed a lot of propellant for the deorbit because the higher you are the more 727 00:56:26,599 --> 00:56:29,520 you have to burn to get down. 728 00:56:29,520 --> 00:56:36,520 And so the flight control community, together with the pilots got together and developed 729 00:56:40,240 --> 00:56:45,460 a special way that we could do maneuvers using only half the number of jets that you normally 730 00:56:45,460 --> 00:56:46,940 use. 731 00:56:46,940 --> 00:56:53,940 And so this is an interconnection between the thermal environment of EVA and the reaction 732 00:56:55,280 --> 00:57:00,109 control propellant budget which nobody in the early days of flight planning would ever 733 00:57:00,109 --> 00:57:02,650 have believed that there is this sort of connection. 734 00:57:02,650 --> 00:57:07,710 But it is just another good example of how these systems all play with one another and 735 00:57:07,710 --> 00:57:11,880 you cannot make changes in one without another. 736 00:57:11,880 --> 00:57:16,130 I am going to finish this unit and then we will take a little break and then I will do 737 00:57:16,130 --> 00:57:16,960 the last part. 738 00:57:16,960 --> 00:57:20,470 The process of getting in the suit. 739 00:57:20,470 --> 00:57:24,640 First you get in LTA, lower torso assembly, basically the pants. 740 00:57:24,640 --> 00:57:29,320 And, of course, this is one time when you can put your pants on both legs at a time. 741 00:57:29,320 --> 00:57:30,910 You cannot do that too often. 742 00:57:30,910 --> 00:57:35,670 But, again, look at the middeck here. 743 00:57:35,670 --> 00:57:36,740 It is full. 744 00:57:36,740 --> 00:57:39,760 This, by the way, is the escape pole. 745 00:57:39,760 --> 00:57:41,970 We talked about this earlier. 746 00:57:41,970 --> 00:57:48,970 During launch and entry it is actually bolted into position so that it will take you out 747 00:57:49,790 --> 00:57:55,760 the door, but once you are in orbit you just sort of float it up and out of the way and 748 00:57:55,760 --> 00:57:57,800 it just kind of Velcroed to the ceiling. 749 00:57:57,800 --> 00:58:01,980 And, of course, it has no weight up there so it is perfectly happy. 750 00:58:01,980 --> 00:58:04,230 You get in the pants. 751 00:58:04,230 --> 00:58:11,109 Now, the upper torso of the suit is attached to the wall inside the airlock. 752 00:58:11,109 --> 00:58:14,300 Now you have to float into the airlock. 753 00:58:14,300 --> 00:58:16,390 And that is what you're looking at when you're getting into the suit. 754 00:58:16,390 --> 00:58:17,950 There are a lot of connections you have to make. 755 00:58:17,950 --> 00:58:20,619 This is the water bag. 756 00:58:20,619 --> 00:58:22,830 This is the comm. 757 00:58:22,830 --> 00:58:26,030 connection for your Snoopy cap. 758 00:58:26,030 --> 00:58:32,530 This is the water and air connection which you have to hook into your LCBG. 759 00:58:32,530 --> 00:58:34,690 And these are the arms that you have to get into. 760 00:58:34,690 --> 00:58:41,690 And the problem in the design here is your shoulders are wider than your chest. 761 00:58:46,859 --> 00:58:52,900 When you are actually inside the suit you want the distance between these two arms to 762 00:58:52,900 --> 00:58:55,170 be conformal with your armpits. 763 00:58:55,170 --> 00:59:00,060 Because, if it is out here that cuts way down on your mobility. 764 00:59:00,060 --> 00:59:04,650 But if it is too narrow you cannot get into it. 765 00:59:04,650 --> 00:59:08,359 That is the basic design problem in this sort of a suit. 766 00:59:08,359 --> 00:59:15,359 Now, the Russians have a rear entry suit that doesn't have that problem. 767 00:59:16,020 --> 00:59:19,910 It is always a challenge and you really have to push and struggle to get in. 768 00:59:19,910 --> 00:59:26,910 Eventually they wanted to design this suit so that one person could get in by themselves, 769 00:59:28,480 --> 00:59:29,770 but it cannot be done. 770 00:59:29,770 --> 00:59:36,770 I mean you can get in like this but you just cannot pull up the waist ring and attach it 771 00:59:37,310 --> 00:59:38,670 by yourself. 772 00:59:38,670 --> 00:59:40,510 Nobody has been able to do that. 773 00:59:40,510 --> 00:59:46,450 It is a great feeling of accomplishment when you finally get inside. 774 00:59:46,450 --> 00:59:50,220 Then you put your helmet on. 775 00:59:50,220 --> 00:59:53,790 Now you're starting to see what we are dealing with because we have to take all this stuff 776 00:59:53,790 --> 00:59:58,010 outside in addition to the tools that are already outside. 777 00:59:58,010 --> 01:00:00,910 These are the plugs which we put the mini work station. 778 01:00:00,910 --> 01:00:07,910 We haven't put it on quite yet but it is just a whole bunch of equipment which you have 779 01:00:08,510 --> 01:00:10,230 to manage. 780 01:00:10,230 --> 01:00:16,980 At this point we purge the suit with an oxygen flow. 781 01:00:16,980 --> 01:00:23,980 Now, remember, we are at an atmospheric pressure, or almost an atmospheric pressure, I will 782 01:00:25,340 --> 01:00:31,070 get into that later, of pure oxygen, so that also puts very serious flammability constraints. 783 01:00:31,070 --> 01:00:35,670 Although, when you go outside, you are only at 4 psi. 784 01:00:35,670 --> 01:00:38,619 When you are inside here you are at the full cabin pressure. 785 01:00:38,619 --> 01:00:44,180 Actually, in order to do your leap check you have to go to 4 psi above cabin pressure. 786 01:00:44,180 --> 01:00:50,030 You are actually working at above one atmosphere of pressure of pure oxygen, so that is a very 787 01:00:50,030 --> 01:00:54,040 serious flammability design constraint. 788 01:00:54,040 --> 01:01:01,040 And we have to sit and breathe pure oxygen then for about 40 minutes to get the nitrogen 789 01:01:01,880 --> 01:01:02,670 out of our blood. 790 01:01:02,670 --> 01:01:06,810 And, again, I will be discussing this whole atmospheric and bends problem. 791 01:01:06,810 --> 01:01:13,560 But, if you don't, when you drop down to 4 psi, the nitrogen in your blood bubbles out 792 01:01:13,560 --> 01:01:20,560 and you get the bends, just like a diver who comes up too fast from a dive. 793 01:01:21,180 --> 01:01:25,540 Just one or two pictures of what went on outside. 794 01:01:25,540 --> 01:01:27,560 There is Hubble. 795 01:01:27,560 --> 01:01:29,099 I was changing some fuels there. 796 01:01:29,099 --> 01:01:31,609 It was kind of neat working underneath the solar panel. 797 01:01:31,609 --> 01:01:34,940 Those were the old ones which we took off and replaced the next day. 798 01:01:34,940 --> 01:01:39,460 But you have to be really careful because you don't want to bang against it. 799 01:01:39,460 --> 01:01:44,470 And, of course, you cannot see above your head, so we always have other people looking 800 01:01:44,470 --> 01:01:44,760 at us. 801 01:01:44,760 --> 01:01:49,640 This is the kind of situation where if you had a little heads up display where you could 802 01:01:49,640 --> 01:01:53,960 get this sort of a view to show what you're really doing it would really improve your 803 01:01:53,960 --> 01:01:55,140 situational awareness. 804 01:01:55,140 --> 01:01:58,869 But, at the moment, we don't have that. 805 01:01:58,869 --> 01:02:04,140 It takes not just the people outside but the people inside paying full attention, reading 806 01:02:04,140 --> 01:02:04,910 procedures. 807 01:02:04,910 --> 01:02:11,910 Historically, we carried all of our procedures on a cuff checklist, like so. 808 01:02:14,680 --> 01:02:18,970 But the procedures for Hubble and some of the other flights are so complex that you 809 01:02:18,970 --> 01:02:19,630 just cannot do it. 810 01:02:19,630 --> 01:02:24,250 So, nowadays, these are just emergency procedures. 811 01:02:24,250 --> 01:02:25,820 I will pass this around. 812 01:02:25,820 --> 01:02:31,490 I would like it back. 813 01:02:31,490 --> 01:02:32,210 Let's see. 814 01:02:32,210 --> 01:02:39,210 After putting in the new Wiff-Pick, ground had to do some tests on it, so I got Claude 815 01:02:40,119 --> 01:02:41,950 to fly me out over the arm. 816 01:02:41,950 --> 01:02:46,099 And we had one of the old Lunar Hasselblad cameras which they let us carry. 817 01:02:46,099 --> 01:02:53,099 Normally, we just use Nikons on the Shuttle, but they let us take a Hasselblad. 818 01:02:53,660 --> 01:02:57,930 That gives a view of what the payload bay looks like EVA. 819 01:02:57,930 --> 01:03:02,140 Here is Story over here working on one of the other things. 820 01:03:02,140 --> 01:03:05,050 The Earth is not flat, don't worry about the picture. 821 01:03:05,050 --> 01:03:12,050 I went around it many times. 822 01:03:12,270 --> 01:03:19,270 And, I mean, some parts of EVA, I really should share it because it just gets really spectacular. 823 01:03:19,609 --> 01:03:25,140 This is about 50 feet, I don't know whether to say above or below or whatever of the Shuttle, 824 01:03:25,140 --> 01:03:28,400 but you're just out there in the middle of nowhere. 825 01:03:28,400 --> 01:03:31,400 And, at this point, I was the free-floater. 826 01:03:31,400 --> 01:03:35,119 One of the people is always attached to the end of the arm, which is good when you have 827 01:03:35,119 --> 01:03:39,760 to move around big pieces of equipment because now you can react the forces with your feet. 828 01:03:39,760 --> 01:03:46,119 When you are a free-floater either you're in a foot restraint, which limits your mobility, 829 01:03:46,119 --> 01:03:51,960 or one hand has to actually be holding you so that you can react forces. 830 01:03:51,960 --> 01:03:58,960 Of course, we are attached by a waste tether, which is then attached to a long real of stainless 831 01:04:02,450 --> 01:04:02,940 steel. 832 01:04:02,940 --> 01:04:09,180 But you can set it so that the springiness is taken out. 833 01:04:09,180 --> 01:04:14,650 And so I could basically, and I did from time to time, must sort of let go. 834 01:04:14,650 --> 01:04:21,650 And it is a really neat feeling because once you convince yourself that you're not going 835 01:04:21,660 --> 01:04:28,619 to fall down, which I'm enough of a physicist to understand the orbital mechanics, but, 836 01:04:28,619 --> 01:04:33,869 nevertheless, the first time I let go it was an interesting feeling. 837 01:04:33,869 --> 01:04:38,380 The thing is when you're holding onto something, whether by your feet or your hands, of course 838 01:04:38,380 --> 01:04:44,910 the Shuttle is so much more massive that you feel yourself physically related. 839 01:04:44,910 --> 01:04:46,450 You are controlled by the Shuttle. 840 01:04:46,450 --> 01:04:49,589 And so the Shuttle is your point of reference. 841 01:04:49,589 --> 01:04:53,410 Maybe the Shuttle is in orbit but you are attached to the Shuttle. 842 01:04:53,410 --> 01:04:57,529 As soon as I let go, the physics totally changes. 843 01:04:57,529 --> 01:05:01,930 And it was really this transformation into being a human satellite. 844 01:05:01,930 --> 01:05:04,220 I mean I really felt like I was a satellite now. 845 01:05:04,220 --> 01:05:05,609 I wasn't attached to the Shuttle. 846 01:05:05,609 --> 01:05:11,520 And sometimes, if I could turn around before I let go so I didn't see the Shuttle, it was 847 01:05:11,520 --> 01:05:15,500 really kind of neat, especially at night, just sort of floating there and all the stars 848 01:05:15,500 --> 01:05:15,940 and everything. 849 01:05:15,940 --> 01:05:16,260 Yeah. 850 01:05:16,260 --> 01:05:22,060 Do they build in time for you to be able to kind of do that kind of thing? 851 01:05:22,060 --> 01:05:24,240 No, they don't build in the time. 852 01:05:24,240 --> 01:05:31,240 But, like in this case, two days before on Story's and my last EVA we had replaced -- Not 853 01:05:31,730 --> 01:05:33,109 replaced. 854 01:05:33,109 --> 01:05:34,720 These are the magnetometers up at the top. 855 01:05:34,720 --> 01:05:41,720 The gross maneuvering of Hubble is done by reaction wheels, but the reaction wheels, 856 01:05:43,060 --> 01:05:46,500 when they get spinning too fast, you have to be able to desaturate them so they have 857 01:05:46,500 --> 01:05:52,300 magnetic torquers, these long torque rods which create a magnetic field. 858 01:05:52,300 --> 01:05:58,670 There are no jets on Hubble because it would cause pollution of the optics, so you need 859 01:05:58,670 --> 01:06:04,849 magnetometers up at the top to sense the magnetic field in order to operate the torquers. 860 01:06:04,849 --> 01:06:08,349 The magnetometers were never designed to be replaced. 861 01:06:08,349 --> 01:06:09,609 They weren't supposed to fail. 862 01:06:09,609 --> 01:06:13,660 Well, both of them failed in the first couple of years. 863 01:06:13,660 --> 01:06:18,950 We couldn't take them off so they designed two new magnetometers that we could actually 864 01:06:18,950 --> 01:06:21,779 insert and bolt on, on top of the old ones. 865 01:06:21,779 --> 01:06:27,520 And then we took the electrical and data connections and hooked them up. 866 01:06:27,520 --> 01:06:33,940 But I noticed on that day -- We were very concerned with quality control. 867 01:06:33,940 --> 01:06:38,270 First of all, that we didn't break anything that wasn't already broken but also to look 868 01:06:38,270 --> 01:06:45,029 for any signs of damage because, you know, this was a telescope that was supposed to 869 01:06:45,029 --> 01:06:47,839 be maintained. 870 01:06:47,839 --> 01:06:51,910 We saw a little bit of paint chipping off the outside of the old magnetometers. 871 01:06:51,910 --> 01:06:58,029 They were concerned that they might float around and get into the optics. 872 01:06:58,029 --> 01:07:04,630 We went into the payload bay the next day, the other EVA team, and they cut off some 873 01:07:04,630 --> 01:07:09,490 of this gold insulation material from one of the thermal enclosures that some of the 874 01:07:09,490 --> 01:07:11,000 equipment was in. 875 01:07:11,000 --> 01:07:13,330 And I'm not supposed to stand in front. 876 01:07:13,330 --> 01:07:18,580 I keep forgetting that. 877 01:07:18,580 --> 01:07:24,500 We made those covers, and then we had to go up and install them. 878 01:07:24,500 --> 01:07:31,500 But, actually, after we installed them then the ground wanted photographic documentation. 879 01:07:34,180 --> 01:07:35,089 We took pictures. 880 01:07:35,089 --> 01:07:40,180 And then the crew inside got their telephoto lenses and they took a lot of pictures. 881 01:07:40,180 --> 01:07:44,500 And then they got the television camera on the end of the arm to take pictures. 882 01:07:44,500 --> 01:07:49,930 And so, during all that time, you do have a little bit of free time just to sort of 883 01:07:49,930 --> 01:07:51,050 enjoy the environment. 884 01:07:51,050 --> 01:07:53,960 It would be a shame not to because it is such a spectacular place. 885 01:07:53,960 --> 01:07:54,359 Yeah. 886 01:07:54,359 --> 01:08:00,490 How do you work when there is not light when you're on the dark side. 887 01:08:00,490 --> 01:08:03,660 Let me turn the laser pointer on here. 888 01:08:03,660 --> 01:08:05,910 Oh, no, what did I do? 889 01:08:05,910 --> 01:08:12,910 That is a good time for a break, right? 890 01:08:13,160 --> 01:08:18,179 Take a two-minute break. 891 01:08:18,179 --> 01:08:24,439 And then, of course, when the sun rises you know it so you can turn your lights off. 892 01:08:24,439 --> 01:08:26,670 OK. 893 01:08:26,670 --> 01:08:33,670 I talked about the necessity of doing a nitrogen purge and pre-breathing oxygen to get the 894 01:08:34,339 --> 01:08:35,429 nitrogen out of your blood. 895 01:08:35,429 --> 01:08:42,158 This turns out to be an interesting systems problem because it doesn't just affect the 896 01:08:42,158 --> 01:08:47,238 suit, it affects the spacecraft. 897 01:08:47,238 --> 01:08:51,279 Those of you who were here at the beginning saw I was blowing up a balloon which unfortunately 898 01:08:51,279 --> 01:08:52,670 popped. 899 01:08:52,670 --> 01:08:59,670 It was only to make the point that you can look at a spacesuit, the arms and legs, cylindrical. 900 01:08:59,959 --> 01:09:02,219 It is like one of those balloons. 901 01:09:02,219 --> 01:09:08,118 And when you try to bend the balloon it doesn't like to stay bent because you are compressing 902 01:09:08,118 --> 01:09:14,389 the gas and you're doing elastic work on the material of the balloon and it wants to snap 903 01:09:14,389 --> 01:09:14,729 back. 904 01:09:14,729 --> 01:09:17,190 And spacesuits basically work the same way. 905 01:09:17,190 --> 01:09:23,618 The old-fashioned pressure suits that test pilots used to wear, which were the genesis 906 01:09:23,618 --> 01:09:27,399 of the original Mercury suits, they basically stiffen you. 907 01:09:27,399 --> 01:09:31,448 And, in fact, the launch entry suits that we use on the Shuttle are not designed for 908 01:09:31,448 --> 01:09:32,259 joint mobility. 909 01:09:32,259 --> 01:09:35,109 They are just pressurized. 910 01:09:35,109 --> 01:09:41,599 And we do a pressure check before the mission when we're getting suited up. 911 01:09:41,599 --> 01:09:47,029 And they blow it up and you just go like that. 912 01:09:47,029 --> 01:09:50,499 You can move a little bit, you know, enough so that if you're sitting in your seat with 913 01:09:50,499 --> 01:09:56,820 a seatbelt holding you in form so that your waist is bent, you can move your arms enough 914 01:09:56,820 --> 01:09:57,789 to get to the controls. 915 01:09:57,789 --> 01:10:01,420 But I certainly wouldn't want to try and go out and do any useful work in that. 916 01:10:01,420 --> 01:10:08,420 It has really been an extraordinary design process that people have been able to develop 917 01:10:10,019 --> 01:10:13,949 spacesuits with articulating joints. 918 01:10:13,949 --> 01:10:19,570 I mean it is certainly not like walking around and doing things just with your body, but 919 01:10:19,570 --> 01:10:24,239 it is amazing how flexible spacesuits are. 920 01:10:24,239 --> 01:10:30,159 And it is a continual challenge to develop, particularly for the gloves. 921 01:10:30,159 --> 01:10:34,440 And, when we get back to the moon, to have legs that can actually walk in so that you 922 01:10:34,440 --> 01:10:36,179 don't have to hop around all the time. 923 01:10:36,179 --> 01:10:38,269 Although, there are times when that is good, too. 924 01:10:38,269 --> 01:10:45,269 But, in any case, the stiffness of the suit, because it turns out that most of the stiffness 925 01:10:47,139 --> 01:10:54,139 comes from compressing the gas, you want to try, first of all, to build articulated joints 926 01:10:54,309 --> 01:10:57,190 that don't change their volume. 927 01:10:57,190 --> 01:11:02,449 And, actually, people have designed metallic suits that look like Robby the Robot. 928 01:11:02,449 --> 01:11:07,010 So, they truly are zero delta volume suits. 929 01:11:07,010 --> 01:11:10,699 The problem is they are very heavy and there are other problems with metallic suits. 930 01:11:10,699 --> 01:11:15,760 And I don't have time to go into that. 931 01:11:15,760 --> 01:11:21,260 Given that you're going to have some volume change, the amount of work that you do is 932 01:11:21,260 --> 01:11:24,699 thermodynamically pressure times volume. 933 01:11:24,699 --> 01:11:27,309 You are going to have a delta V. 934 01:11:27,309 --> 01:11:29,389 You want to reduce the pressure. 935 01:11:29,389 --> 01:11:35,800 The lower your suit pressure, the easier it is to bend. 936 01:11:35,800 --> 01:11:42,679 Basically, you don't want to fill your suit with any gas that you don't really need. 937 01:11:42,679 --> 01:11:48,630 We certainly don't need nitrogen to stay alive, not on a short-term basis, so we fill the 938 01:11:48,630 --> 01:11:52,099 suit with oxygen. 939 01:11:52,099 --> 01:11:57,820 And we run it at about 4.3 psi for the Shuttle. 940 01:11:57,820 --> 01:12:04,820 This is just historically Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, the suit pressure was a little 941 01:12:05,699 --> 01:12:06,079 bit lower. 942 01:12:06,079 --> 01:12:13,079 Doctors felt, after doing calculations, what you're really interested in is the partial 943 01:12:14,469 --> 01:12:16,699 pressure of oxygen in your blood. 944 01:12:16,699 --> 01:12:19,329 And they wanted a little bit more margin. 945 01:12:19,329 --> 01:12:23,159 Since the Shuttle was supposed to be operational this and operational that, they wanted a little 946 01:12:23,159 --> 01:12:25,869 bit more margin. 947 01:12:25,869 --> 01:12:30,429 And so we bumped up the suit pressure a little bit. 948 01:12:30,429 --> 01:12:37,199 Mercury, Gemini and Apollo cabin was 100% oxygen at the same pressure so that you didn't 949 01:12:37,199 --> 01:12:40,340 have to worry about pre-breathing. 950 01:12:40,340 --> 01:12:46,329 In Skylab, it was not pure oxygen but it was a high enough oxygen that, again, they didn't 951 01:12:46,329 --> 01:12:47,599 have to worry about pre-breathe. 952 01:12:47,599 --> 01:12:54,599 It wasn't until we went to the Shuttle, which typically the Shuttle is at 14.7 or 100 kilopascals 953 01:12:58,869 --> 01:13:02,280 normal atmospheric pressure. 954 01:13:02,280 --> 01:13:07,840 If we know we are going to be doing a lot of EVAs, and I will talk about this later, 955 01:13:07,840 --> 01:13:13,849 what we do is we drop the overall cabin pressure, but we keep the partial pressure of oxygen 956 01:13:13,849 --> 01:13:18,699 the same so you end up bumping up the oxygen concentration. 957 01:13:18,699 --> 01:13:21,099 We don't do that with the ISS. 958 01:13:21,099 --> 01:13:28,099 The decision was made by the life scientists that since they wanted to study biology on 959 01:13:28,670 --> 01:13:35,639 the Space Station and all of our database is at one atmosphere, that if they took the 960 01:13:35,639 --> 01:13:42,479 Space Station down to 10.2 psi basically it would invalidate all of their life science 961 01:13:42,479 --> 01:13:44,369 research. 962 01:13:44,369 --> 01:13:47,559 So, the Station was only designed for one atmosphere. 963 01:13:47,559 --> 01:13:51,820 The operational people, when they started to talk about how much EVA was going to be 964 01:13:51,820 --> 01:13:58,300 involved in building and maintaining the Space Station, the astronauts said this is crazy. 965 01:13:58,300 --> 01:14:05,300 And you will see the impact of this later. 966 01:14:06,889 --> 01:14:08,699 This is just looking in the future. 967 01:14:08,699 --> 01:14:14,570 These are decisions that are going have to be made for future space systems, and they 968 01:14:14,570 --> 01:14:17,860 are looking at a lower working pressure. 969 01:14:17,860 --> 01:14:23,559 And you will see why as I go through this presentation. 970 01:14:23,559 --> 01:14:28,119 I think I'm not going to go through those charts. 971 01:14:28,119 --> 01:14:29,699 Again, this is a system. 972 01:14:29,699 --> 01:14:33,570 So, you are affecting a great many different things. 973 01:14:33,570 --> 01:14:37,659 Let's see. 974 01:14:37,659 --> 01:14:44,659 Which is the laser here? 975 01:14:44,769 --> 01:14:49,300 There we go. 976 01:14:49,300 --> 01:14:56,300 One of the interesting things here with EVA, just like in any ECLS system, is that the 977 01:14:57,539 --> 01:15:03,150 human body becomes one of your subsystems that you have to take care of. 978 01:15:03,150 --> 01:15:07,650 And, in many cases, we don't have a whole lot of design flexibility with our bodies 979 01:15:07,650 --> 01:15:11,229 because they come predesigned. 980 01:15:11,229 --> 01:15:15,079 So, we have to deal with that. 981 01:15:15,079 --> 01:15:22,079 We have all of the physiology, the bends. 982 01:15:22,639 --> 01:15:22,889 Materials. I talked about flammability in a pure oxygen environment. 983 01:15:25,820 --> 01:15:32,820 I talked about the constraints of microgravity and partial gravity physiology studies in 984 01:15:33,170 --> 01:15:33,829 the ISS. 985 01:15:33,829 --> 01:15:40,829 Of course, NASA has decided that we don't need to do that anymore. 986 01:15:41,190 --> 01:15:44,440 And, I guess, our international partners are still going to want to do this. 987 01:15:44,440 --> 01:15:47,449 In any case, the Station is designed. 988 01:15:47,449 --> 01:15:53,809 The cooling we talked about, I think, in the ECLA section lecture, the fact that if you 989 01:15:53,809 --> 01:15:58,340 drop your cabin pressure now you've got to pump more air for all the air cooled things. 990 01:15:58,340 --> 01:16:05,340 And if you really want a design for a variable cabin pressure then that flows over into the 991 01:16:07,959 --> 01:16:14,959 cooling requirements, more water cooling, different fan requirements and so on. 992 01:16:15,849 --> 01:16:17,079 And it goes on. 993 01:16:17,079 --> 01:16:24,079 If you are going to do multiple EVAs, what you're really interested in, when you're looking 994 01:16:26,840 --> 01:16:33,300 at efficiency, is what we call EVA Work Efficiency Index. 995 01:16:33,300 --> 01:16:40,300 It is the total amount of time involved in preparing for and carrying out an EVA, the 996 01:16:40,380 --> 01:16:43,979 ratio of that to the actual useful working time you get outside. 997 01:16:43,979 --> 01:16:49,619 And the more time you have to spend breathing pure oxygen to denitrogenate your blood, that 998 01:16:49,619 --> 01:16:52,619 is taking away from your overall work efficiency. 999 01:16:52,619 --> 01:16:58,159 When we do tests on the ground and we start out at normal sea level pressure and we want 1000 01:16:58,159 --> 01:17:05,159 to go down to 4.3 psi pure oxygen, we actually have to do a four hour nitrogen purge. 1001 01:17:09,199 --> 01:17:14,760 We have to just sit in the suit or stand in the suit for four hours, this is in the EVA 1002 01:17:14,760 --> 01:17:18,409 test chambers, before we actually can go down to pressure. 1003 01:17:18,409 --> 01:17:22,749 If you want to get an eight hour work day of EVA, that is just unacceptable. 1004 01:17:22,749 --> 01:17:28,110 And that is why they made the decision to lower the Shuttle's cabin pressure. 1005 01:17:28,110 --> 01:17:30,679 Then you only have to do about a 40 minute EVA. 1006 01:17:30,679 --> 01:17:36,459 And I have some of the specific numbers on that later. 1007 01:17:36,459 --> 01:17:41,289 As I say, just the review here is that we do have this capability on the Shuttle. 1008 01:17:41,289 --> 01:17:44,949 We don't have it on the Station. 1009 01:17:44,949 --> 01:17:49,219 They have figured out a few ways to make the denitrogenation process a little bit more 1010 01:17:49,219 --> 01:17:54,880 efficient on the Station, but it is still a big overhead hit. 1011 01:17:54,880 --> 01:18:01,840 And we are very concerned for the future because EVA is not just an afterthought when you're 1012 01:18:01,840 --> 01:18:04,380 going to be exploring on the Moon or Mars. 1013 01:18:04,380 --> 01:18:07,829 You are going there basically to do EVA. 1014 01:18:07,829 --> 01:18:10,690 Otherwise, why bother? 1015 01:18:10,690 --> 01:18:13,209 We have got to deal with this. 1016 01:18:13,209 --> 01:18:18,699 Here is the basic physiology that we are dealing with. 1017 01:18:18,699 --> 01:18:25,699 Oxygen percentage on the abscissa, total pressure on the ordinate and all different units. 1018 01:18:26,479 --> 01:18:33,479 Millimeters of mercury, psi, and I think now people use kilopascals, which I don't really 1019 01:18:34,639 --> 01:18:35,329 relate to. 1020 01:18:35,329 --> 01:18:39,820 But I know about 100 kilopascals is about one atmosphere, so luckily that makes it easy. 1021 01:18:39,820 --> 01:18:46,820 Normally, we are at one atmosphere 20% or 21% oxygen, we are up here, and this is the 1022 01:18:49,829 --> 01:18:53,940 normal sea level equivalent. 1023 01:18:53,940 --> 01:19:00,940 You start dropping the pressure and you have to increase the percentage of oxygen. 1024 01:19:02,010 --> 01:19:09,010 There is a maximum level of breathing oxygen at pressure oxygen toxicity because oxygen 1025 01:19:11,760 --> 01:19:16,320 is almost totally absorbed through your alveoli. 1026 01:19:16,320 --> 01:19:23,320 And normally our alveoli stay inflated because we have 80% nitrogen which is only very reluctantly 1027 01:19:24,550 --> 01:19:25,070 absorbed. 1028 01:19:25,070 --> 01:19:28,969 I mean it does get through, that is how it gets into our blood and so on, but it is a 1029 01:19:28,969 --> 01:19:30,409 much slower transport. 1030 01:19:30,409 --> 01:19:31,909 But oxygen gets right through. 1031 01:19:31,909 --> 01:19:38,909 And if you breathe pure oxygen for a long time you can really hurt your lungs and it 1032 01:19:40,959 --> 01:19:44,010 can be lethal at a certain point. 1033 01:19:44,010 --> 01:19:49,119 We actually don't have any good physiological data. 1034 01:19:49,119 --> 01:19:51,789 I was down in Houston last week at a big EVA conference. 1035 01:19:51,789 --> 01:19:53,760 That is why we didn't have class on Tuesday. 1036 01:19:53,760 --> 01:20:00,719 They were talking about what about long-term planetary EVAs, even at 4 psi pure oxygen, 1037 01:20:00,719 --> 01:20:03,329 is that going to be harmful to health? 1038 01:20:03,329 --> 01:20:04,079 We honestly don't know. 1039 01:20:04,079 --> 01:20:10,219 I mean that is an active area which needs research. 1040 01:20:10,219 --> 01:20:15,689 On the other side, of course you get into hypoxia which you have all heard of. 1041 01:20:15,689 --> 01:20:19,579 You get it when you go up on Mount Everest and so on. 1042 01:20:19,579 --> 01:20:26,579 So, you've got a boundary that you have to work in. 1043 01:20:27,159 --> 01:20:31,939 Now, this is sort of where things have fallen. 1044 01:20:31,939 --> 01:20:34,939 The blue line is the hypoxic boundary. 1045 01:20:34,939 --> 01:20:39,659 The green line is normal oxygen. 1046 01:20:39,659 --> 01:20:45,820 When we were using pure oxygen spacecraft environments, we were well above that. 1047 01:20:45,820 --> 01:20:48,090 You would like to stay as close as possible. 1048 01:20:48,090 --> 01:20:55,090 With Shuttle EVA, we moved a little bit closer to hypoxic, but we're still in a physiologically 1049 01:20:55,300 --> 01:21:02,300 perfectly reasonable environment. 1050 01:21:02,639 --> 01:21:04,889 Decompression sickness, just a quick review. 1051 01:21:04,889 --> 01:21:06,030 Any scuba divers here? 1052 01:21:06,030 --> 01:21:09,489 You are all familiar with this. 1053 01:21:09,489 --> 01:21:16,489 There are various levels of decompression sickness anywhere from just a mild tingling 1054 01:21:17,139 --> 01:21:24,139 of the skin to joint pain to phase three DCS where you get central nervous system impairment 1055 01:21:25,489 --> 01:21:32,489 which can actually cause death, so you don't want to mess around with it. 1056 01:21:36,380 --> 01:21:39,059 People refer to this famous R value. 1057 01:21:39,059 --> 01:21:40,590 You run into this all the time. 1058 01:21:40,590 --> 01:21:47,249 What you are really interested in is what is the ratio between the actual partial pressure 1059 01:21:47,249 --> 01:21:52,900 of nitrogen in your blood compared to your suit pressure? 1060 01:21:52,900 --> 01:21:57,090 And this over here shows this R value. 1061 01:21:57,090 --> 01:22:03,550 If you are down at one the nitrogen isn't going to bubble out at all so you have no 1062 01:22:03,550 --> 01:22:05,709 incidence of bends. 1063 01:22:05,709 --> 01:22:12,579 VGE, venous gas emboli. 1064 01:22:12,579 --> 01:22:19,579 And then, as the R value increases, the dotted line gas emboli, that just means you have 1065 01:22:20,110 --> 01:22:20,909 bubbles forming. 1066 01:22:20,909 --> 01:22:26,099 DCS means actual symptoms of bends. 1067 01:22:26,099 --> 01:22:30,300 And then grade three DCS which is very serious indeed. 1068 01:22:30,300 --> 01:22:37,300 The way they make these measurements, they have these large physiological studies where 1069 01:22:37,389 --> 01:22:42,329 they actually get people to volunteer to go through these pumped down protocols. 1070 01:22:42,329 --> 01:22:48,659 And then they actually put sensitive microphones and ultrasound things that can actually hear 1071 01:22:48,659 --> 01:22:51,249 the bubbles as they move around your veins. 1072 01:22:51,249 --> 01:22:56,070 I have never been able to figure out why anybody would volunteer for these experiments. 1073 01:22:56,070 --> 01:22:59,739 I take my hat off to them. 1074 01:22:59,739 --> 01:23:06,300 Because the only way you build up this data is that some people actually do get the bends 1075 01:23:06,300 --> 01:23:07,170 from these experiments. 1076 01:23:07,170 --> 01:23:12,849 And, of course, they have hyperbaric chambers which, as soon as there are any symptoms, 1077 01:23:12,849 --> 01:23:17,079 they put them right into the chamber and pump them to pressure and it goes away. 1078 01:23:17,079 --> 01:23:20,439 And I don't think that they have lost any volunteers. 1079 01:23:20,439 --> 01:23:26,400 Like I say, that is not something I am going to volunteer for. 1080 01:23:26,400 --> 01:23:31,360 Other factors, this is something that becomes important. 1081 01:23:31,360 --> 01:23:36,630 It turns out that the amount of time you spend at reduced pressure is important. 1082 01:23:36,630 --> 01:23:37,860 Also exercise. 1083 01:23:37,860 --> 01:23:42,739 It turns out that the more you exercise, maybe it makes sense, you're moving your joints 1084 01:23:42,739 --> 01:23:45,469 around, but the bubbles come out. 1085 01:23:45,469 --> 01:23:48,579 Actually, what they have started to do on the Space Station, since we cannot go to a 1086 01:23:48,579 --> 01:23:55,579 reduced cabin, that while they are breathing oxygen for the first hour or so they do very 1087 01:23:55,590 --> 01:24:01,849 exhaustive exercise, both upper and lower body on an exercise bike with arm exercise 1088 01:24:01,849 --> 01:24:02,280 as well. 1089 01:24:02,280 --> 01:24:09,280 To try to drive away as much of the oxygen early on in the decompression preparation 1090 01:24:10,570 --> 01:24:11,429 as you can. 1091 01:24:11,429 --> 01:24:14,219 OK. 1092 01:24:14,219 --> 01:24:16,900 Where does that put us? 1093 01:24:16,900 --> 01:24:22,079 As I said, the more nitrogen you have in your blood to start out with, the longer a pre-breathe 1094 01:24:22,079 --> 01:24:28,829 you are going to have to do before you can go out. 1095 01:24:28,829 --> 01:24:32,949 These are the normoxic and hypoxic lines, which I showed you before. 1096 01:24:32,949 --> 01:24:39,139 And then these are the contours of the amount of time you have to pre-breathe. 1097 01:24:39,139 --> 01:24:46,139 Remember, I told you if you are at one atmosphere, 20% oxygen, your pre-breathe time is 240 minutes, 1098 01:24:48,139 --> 01:24:49,409 four hours. 1099 01:24:49,409 --> 01:24:53,499 This is to get yourself down to an R value of 1.65. 1100 01:24:53,499 --> 01:25:00,499 This is not 100% safe because, remember, at 1.65, there still is a 25% incidence of DCS. 1101 01:25:08,650 --> 01:25:15,650 Now, the interesting thing, these are the statistics that come from the laboratory trials, 1102 01:25:15,840 --> 01:25:21,760 we have never had a reported case of bends during EVAs. 1103 01:25:21,760 --> 01:25:25,949 And people are not quite sure why. 1104 01:25:25,949 --> 01:25:30,820 Some people suspect that maybe even if an astronaut is getting joint pain they are not 1105 01:25:30,820 --> 01:25:37,539 going to report it because maybe that would prevent you from doing another EVA. 1106 01:25:37,539 --> 01:25:42,769 I mean there are enough other pains that you undergo in just using a spacesuit that maybe 1107 01:25:42,769 --> 01:25:44,170 you don't even notice it. 1108 01:25:44,170 --> 01:25:48,579 You feel a problem in your joints or your fingers and you say oh, damn, my gloves don't 1109 01:25:48,579 --> 01:25:53,789 fit right or something like that. 1110 01:25:53,789 --> 01:25:55,550 I have another slide mentioning this later. 1111 01:25:55,550 --> 01:26:02,550 There is some suspicion that weightlessness may have an impact, which means that the bends 1112 01:26:04,179 --> 01:26:10,999 susceptibility on the Moon or on Mars may actually be greater than it is in weightlessness. 1113 01:26:10,999 --> 01:26:15,579 We just don't know. 1114 01:26:15,579 --> 01:26:18,860 Here is where we have gotten to on the Shuttle EVA. 1115 01:26:18,860 --> 01:26:25,389 Again, this is no pre-breathe, this is one hour pre-breathe, so we are at about 40 minutes 1116 01:26:25,389 --> 01:26:26,329 on the Shuttle. 1117 01:26:26,329 --> 01:26:30,189 That is where we are. 1118 01:26:30,189 --> 01:26:33,630 Now, this is a design problem. 1119 01:26:33,630 --> 01:26:35,260 How are we going to design the CEV? 1120 01:26:35,260 --> 01:26:40,039 How are we going to design the equipment, the habitats that we are going to use on the 1121 01:26:40,039 --> 01:26:43,519 Moon and Mars? 1122 01:26:43,519 --> 01:26:45,539 Now we're talking about surface exploration. 1123 01:26:45,539 --> 01:26:52,539 And, as I said, there is a lot of uncertainty about the affect of gravity. 1124 01:26:52,780 --> 01:26:58,670 But we suspect that it may be more bends inducing than weightlessness. 1125 01:26:58,670 --> 01:27:05,670 And so what they are doing for safety and conservatism is instead of using the R value 1126 01:27:07,019 --> 01:27:14,019 of 1.65, which we use on the Shuttle, they are taking it down to about 1.3, 1.4. 1127 01:27:18,239 --> 01:27:19,499 Now, what does that do? 1128 01:27:19,499 --> 01:27:22,349 Here is 1.4, 1.3. 1129 01:27:22,349 --> 01:27:27,249 Where does that put the Shuttle EVA we now would have to get down to that R value? 1130 01:27:27,249 --> 01:27:31,530 We have got a two hour pre-breathe. 1131 01:27:31,530 --> 01:27:37,769 To get down to 1.3, we have got a 2.5 hour pre-breathe. 1132 01:27:37,769 --> 01:27:42,499 And this is with the normal spacesuit at 4.3 psi. 1133 01:27:42,499 --> 01:27:46,369 We are heading an operational problem. 1134 01:27:46,369 --> 01:27:51,949 If you want to go out on your geology traverse on the Moon, you have got to depressurize, 1135 01:27:51,949 --> 01:27:53,539 denitrogenate for 2, 2.5 hours. 1136 01:27:53,539 --> 01:27:55,110 I don't think so. 1137 01:27:55,110 --> 01:27:56,959 But what are we going to do? 1138 01:27:56,959 --> 01:28:03,959 Well, if you increase the suit pressure now the R value, at a given level of nitrogen, 1139 01:28:06,510 --> 01:28:07,739 goes down. 1140 01:28:07,739 --> 01:28:14,739 And so at 6 psi, even for an R of 1.3, you are in the zero pre-breathe range, which would 1141 01:28:17,610 --> 01:28:19,269 be great. 1142 01:28:19,269 --> 01:28:24,599 People have suggested, well, maybe we should build a variable pressure suit so that you 1143 01:28:24,599 --> 01:28:29,360 could go out at 6 psi, sort of get things set up. 1144 01:28:29,360 --> 01:28:35,360 And then all that time counts towards your denitrogenation so maybe then after two hours 1145 01:28:35,360 --> 01:28:37,360 into your EVA now you can drop your pressure. 1146 01:28:37,360 --> 01:28:41,809 And now, if you have any things where you need more dexterity, you will be OK. 1147 01:28:41,809 --> 01:28:48,809 But the pressure control system in a spacesuit is a very complex undertaking. 1148 01:28:49,959 --> 01:28:52,769 The Russians do have a dual pressure suit. 1149 01:28:52,769 --> 01:28:57,380 They never used the lower pressure, to my knowledge. 1150 01:28:57,380 --> 01:29:00,789 And it is a big hit to try to design this into the suit. 1151 01:29:00,789 --> 01:29:03,959 And, of course, to design a suit to operate at a higher pressure. 1152 01:29:03,959 --> 01:29:10,289 The Russians work at about 5 psi, but it means your suit is less flexible, heavier and is 1153 01:29:10,289 --> 01:29:16,209 just going the opposite direction from the desire to accomplish useful work, which is 1154 01:29:16,209 --> 01:29:19,439 why you are putting on the spacesuit in the first place. 1155 01:29:19,439 --> 01:29:23,689 This is what we are working against. 1156 01:29:23,689 --> 01:29:25,030 Again, we have got a systems problem. 1157 01:29:25,030 --> 01:29:26,800 It is not just the pressure. 1158 01:29:26,800 --> 01:29:30,999 It is the oxygen. 1159 01:29:30,999 --> 01:29:37,999 In Skylab, in Apollo, because you were working in a pure oxygen environment, now, of course, 1160 01:29:39,229 --> 01:29:42,780 we're talking about what is the pressure going to be in the cabin. 1161 01:29:42,780 --> 01:29:48,119 You want to keep the cabin at a higher oxygen environment. 1162 01:29:48,119 --> 01:29:50,889 Your material selection is highly limited. 1163 01:29:50,889 --> 01:29:54,510 As it says, they tended to use a lot of metallic materials. 1164 01:29:54,510 --> 01:29:56,599 Well, what do we know about metals? 1165 01:29:56,599 --> 01:29:58,729 Particularly aluminum. 1166 01:29:58,729 --> 01:30:03,229 First of all, aluminum will burn at 100% oxygen. 1167 01:30:03,229 --> 01:30:08,749 But your cabin, even if it is not 100% oxygen, you are going to have a lot of metallic material. 1168 01:30:08,749 --> 01:30:15,749 Well, metal, when you're dealing with radiation, you hit metal, aluminum or even higher atomic 1169 01:30:19,420 --> 01:30:24,039 number metals with primary cosmic rays and you get spallation. 1170 01:30:24,039 --> 01:30:26,409 You produce a lot of secondary particles. 1171 01:30:26,409 --> 01:30:30,639 And you end up with actually more radiation than you would have gotten if you had just 1172 01:30:30,639 --> 01:30:32,869 gotten hit by the incident cosmic ray. 1173 01:30:32,869 --> 01:30:37,699 What you really prefer is to have low atomic number. 1174 01:30:37,699 --> 01:30:39,579 Hydrogen is best. 1175 01:30:39,579 --> 01:30:42,400 Water, hydrogen, oxygen and so forth. 1176 01:30:42,400 --> 01:30:48,999 If you are forced to increase the metallic content of your spacecraft because of the 1177 01:30:48,999 --> 01:30:55,999 oxygen flammability problems now you are going in the wrong direction for radiation protection 1178 01:30:58,429 --> 01:31:04,309 which becomes an issue when you're dealing with long duration stays on the Moon, interplanetary 1179 01:31:04,309 --> 01:31:06,380 transport and so on. 1180 01:31:06,380 --> 01:31:08,139 So, it is all interrelated. 1181 01:31:08,139 --> 01:31:13,769 You cannot change one thing without changing the other. 1182 01:31:13,769 --> 01:31:14,030 Flammability. 1183 01:31:14,030 --> 01:31:15,300 Well, we have been talking about that. 1184 01:31:15,300 --> 01:31:18,079 I won't stay on that. 1185 01:31:18,079 --> 01:31:24,249 But, again, it is very dependent on oxygen. 1186 01:31:24,249 --> 01:31:27,010 Oxygen restricts the use of non-metallic materials. 1187 01:31:27,010 --> 01:31:32,170 But nonmetallic materials are what we would like to use from a radiation point of view. 1188 01:31:32,170 --> 01:31:38,189 You would like to have a lot of hydrocarbons, you know, polyethylene plastic in your spacecraft 1189 01:31:38,189 --> 01:31:43,070 because they absorb cosmic rays. 1190 01:31:43,070 --> 01:31:49,820 But, in any case, it is pretty well agreed that we never want to go above 30% oxygen. 1191 01:31:49,820 --> 01:31:55,189 It just becomes too restrictive on the types of materials we can use. 1192 01:31:55,189 --> 01:31:56,840 That is going to be a design constraint. 1193 01:31:56,840 --> 01:32:03,840 And, remember, we are aiming towards a systems level design of our long duration space habitats 1194 01:32:05,590 --> 01:32:07,039 which are EVA compatible. 1195 01:32:07,039 --> 01:32:09,539 30% oxygen. 1196 01:32:09,539 --> 01:32:11,260 Now we are back to this. 1197 01:32:11,260 --> 01:32:13,170 Now we can draw a red line. 1198 01:32:13,170 --> 01:32:15,599 And we have got to stay on the left of that line. 1199 01:32:15,599 --> 01:32:19,949 We have got to stay above the blue hypoxic line. 1200 01:32:19,949 --> 01:32:26,949 Now, also remember that we have got these pre-breathe lines. 1201 01:32:27,429 --> 01:32:31,849 Let's say we are going to limit pre-breathe to no more than one hour. 1202 01:32:31,849 --> 01:32:35,869 Well, we are cutting down on our design space here. 1203 01:32:35,869 --> 01:32:40,110 We have got the oxygen flammability which is cutting off to the right. 1204 01:32:40,110 --> 01:32:44,239 We have got the hypoxic limit which is cutting off in this direction. 1205 01:32:44,239 --> 01:32:47,869 And we have got the pre-breathe limit which is cutting off there. 1206 01:32:47,869 --> 01:32:54,869 We are kind of in a, I won't call it a box, a rather small triangle. 1207 01:32:57,349 --> 01:33:03,869 Now, if we go to a 6 psi spacesuit, as I said, we open up the design space a lot. 1208 01:33:03,869 --> 01:33:10,019 But at a price of flexibility, maneuverability and the ability to do the things that we want 1209 01:33:10,019 --> 01:33:14,530 to do in the first place. 1210 01:33:14,530 --> 01:33:16,699 Where are we going to go with this? 1211 01:33:16,699 --> 01:33:19,340 As I say, it is an active area of research. 1212 01:33:19,340 --> 01:33:26,340 I cannot tell you what the answer is going to be but it looks like they are going to 1213 01:33:30,719 --> 01:33:37,719 probably be going for 8 to 9 psi with an oxygen concentration approaching 30%. 1214 01:33:39,249 --> 01:33:44,689 And that the CEV, from what I have been told, is most likely going to be designed with a 1215 01:33:44,689 --> 01:33:48,939 variable pressure capability because it also has to be able to dock with the Space Station 1216 01:33:48,939 --> 01:33:51,309 which means it has to be able to take one atmosphere. 1217 01:33:51,309 --> 01:33:58,309 And also, because the CEV by itself is not going to have an airlock, if you would have 1218 01:33:58,369 --> 01:34:03,689 to do an emergency EVA out of the CEV, for whatever reason, you are going to have to 1219 01:34:03,689 --> 01:34:10,689 depressurize like we did back in the Gemini days, or Apollo. 1220 01:34:10,820 --> 01:34:17,449 And, of course, that is going to affect the design of all the other systems on the CEV 1221 01:34:17,449 --> 01:34:24,449 because they will have to be able to operate from a vacuum all the way up to one atmosphere. 1222 01:34:28,420 --> 01:34:34,010 Just in the end, I hope what you have gotten out of this is, again, we are trying to look 1223 01:34:34,010 --> 01:34:37,039 at things from a systems engineering point of view. 1224 01:34:37,039 --> 01:34:43,619 And this is one big system where EVA cannot be considered just on its own. 1225 01:34:43,619 --> 01:34:50,400 I gave an example of how it affects the RCS system with Hubble. 1226 01:34:50,400 --> 01:34:54,409 Here it affects the environmental control life support. 1227 01:34:54,409 --> 01:35:01,409 Flammability, radiation protection, it is all linked together. 1228 01:35:02,639 --> 01:35:09,639 This was the recommendation that we came out with, slightly below 9 psi pushing 30%. 1229 01:35:10,409 --> 01:35:17,409 But, as I said, there is a lot of research that has to be done to understand the way 1230 01:35:17,610 --> 01:35:22,478 bends behave at partial gravity. 1231 01:35:22,478 --> 01:35:23,419 How we are going to do that? 1232 01:35:23,419 --> 01:35:30,070 I have no idea. 1233 01:35:30,070 --> 01:35:37,070 As I said, for the International Space Station, we have to be able to go up to regular atmosphere. 1234 01:35:43,439 --> 01:35:48,429 We were making this presentation as part of the study we were doing last year on CEV, 1235 01:35:48,429 --> 01:35:53,769 but it was so relevant to what we did here that I didn't see any point in modifying it 1236 01:35:53,769 --> 01:35:54,419 for this class. 1237 01:35:54,419 --> 01:36:01,419 But we had to make these decisions on the Shuttle based on similar calculations looking 1238 01:36:02,709 --> 01:36:03,959 at the design space. 1239 01:36:03,959 --> 01:36:10,079 The difference was with the Shuttle we were using an R value of 1.6, 1.7. 1240 01:36:10,079 --> 01:36:14,860 And so we were able to get down to a 40 minute pre-breathe. 1241 01:36:14,860 --> 01:36:21,189 What we do with the Shuttle is about the day before you are going to do your first EVA 1242 01:36:21,189 --> 01:36:25,739 you actually drop the cabin pressure. 1243 01:36:25,739 --> 01:36:31,380 And when we had the lecture on environmental control, remember there is a cabin pressure 1244 01:36:31,380 --> 01:36:35,309 controller at 14.7 and a pressure controller at 8 psi. 1245 01:36:35,309 --> 01:36:41,519 But when they designed the Shuttle, nobody was thinking about EVA or about this pre-breathe 1246 01:36:41,519 --> 01:36:41,800 time. 1247 01:36:41,800 --> 01:36:45,019 And so, there is no 10.2 controller. 1248 01:36:45,019 --> 01:36:46,459 We have to do that manually. 1249 01:36:46,459 --> 01:36:51,099 You drop it and then you add a little bit of nitrogen or a little bit of oxygen, depending 1250 01:36:51,099 --> 01:36:54,669 on what the instrumentation tells you you need. 1251 01:36:54,669 --> 01:37:01,559 And then there is a periodic maintenance which you have to perform in order to keep the proper 1252 01:37:01,559 --> 01:37:07,320 gas concentrations. 1253 01:37:07,320 --> 01:37:11,209 And then we leave it down there for the duration of all the EVAs. 1254 01:37:11,209 --> 01:37:18,209 And then, when the last EVA is finished, then you turn the 14.7 controller back on. 1255 01:37:18,219 --> 01:37:25,219 Now, of course, since you have the proper oxygen partial pressure, most of the gas that 1256 01:37:27,699 --> 01:37:29,949 comes into the cabin is nitrogen. 1257 01:37:29,949 --> 01:37:34,820 And, actually, I think we may have mentioned this before, it comes in the bathroom. 1258 01:37:34,820 --> 01:37:41,820 And so, for the time when you are re-pressurizing the cabin, the bathroom is off limits. 1259 01:37:44,349 --> 01:37:46,030 And I think that is basically it. 1260 01:37:46,030 --> 01:37:51,320 The timing has been pretty good. 1261 01:37:51,320 --> 01:37:51,929 Questions? 1262 01:37:51,929 --> 01:37:52,369 Comments? 1263 01:37:52,369 --> 01:37:53,249 Yeah. 1264 01:37:53,249 --> 01:38:00,249 Is anybody looking at using a fully one atmospheric spacesuit? 1265 01:38:06,019 --> 01:38:09,159 Actually, it turns out there is a principle called holdings principle. 1266 01:38:09,159 --> 01:38:16,159 Let me get this up because I have some pictures of what we were doing. 1267 01:38:32,610 --> 01:38:38,419 If you change by less than a factor of two you don't get the bends. 1268 01:38:38,419 --> 01:38:40,939 This is an empirical finding. 1269 01:38:40,939 --> 01:38:47,939 And so, the idea was if you could have a suit that worked at about 8 psi you would have 1270 01:38:48,010 --> 01:38:49,820 a zero pre-breathe suit. 1271 01:38:49,820 --> 01:38:52,079 And I participated in a bunch of tests. 1272 01:38:52,079 --> 01:38:59,079 These are some other robotic things. 1273 01:39:00,929 --> 01:39:06,439 This was the hard suit designed by Ames. 1274 01:39:06,439 --> 01:39:12,539 Because it is a constant volume suit it is not sensitive to the pressure the way that 1275 01:39:12,539 --> 01:39:16,269 a soft suit is. 1276 01:39:16,269 --> 01:39:19,739 And we did a lot of tests, actually. 1277 01:39:19,739 --> 01:39:23,550 We always came unstuck on the gloves. 1278 01:39:23,550 --> 01:39:30,550 Nobody has been able to design an 8 psi glove that really gives you sufficient mobility. 1279 01:39:31,869 --> 01:39:32,939 I mean it is a dream. 1280 01:39:32,939 --> 01:39:34,280 People would love to be able to do it. 1281 01:39:34,280 --> 01:39:36,909 If we could figure it out that would solve all these problems. 1282 01:39:36,909 --> 01:39:43,909 Although, if you are going to Mars maybe you don't want full pressure because if you have 1283 01:39:47,159 --> 01:39:54,159 one atmosphere compared to 8 or 9 psi your structure has to be that much thicker and 1284 01:39:55,469 --> 01:39:55,919 heavier. 1285 01:39:55,919 --> 01:39:58,999 They went through some of those calculations. 1286 01:39:58,999 --> 01:40:01,409 This is now on the hand with the Space Station. 1287 01:40:01,409 --> 01:40:05,789 And they figured that for all the meteorite shielding and everything they had to put on 1288 01:40:05,789 --> 01:40:11,400 the outside of the Space Station that actually the change in thickness that would be involved 1289 01:40:11,400 --> 01:40:16,978 in changing the pressure from one atmosphere to another really wouldn't make that much 1290 01:40:16,978 --> 01:40:18,889 of a difference. 1291 01:40:18,889 --> 01:40:22,789 All of these things, again, they are interrelated. 1292 01:40:22,789 --> 01:40:24,749 But it is a good point. 1293 01:40:24,749 --> 01:40:30,209 That is why I showed those designs for 6 psi because people are still thinking suppose 1294 01:40:30,209 --> 01:40:33,780 we could design a spacesuit to work at a higher pressure. 1295 01:40:33,780 --> 01:40:40,780 But right now we don't know how to do that. 1296 01:40:43,019 --> 01:40:45,679 I hope everybody has a very happy Thanksgiving. 1297 01:40:45,679 --> 01:40:48,719 We will see you a week from today. 1298 01:40:48,719 --> 01:40:55,719 And if there are any questions, again, about either your oral presentations or the written 1299 01:40:57,510 --> 01:41:01,329 presentations, I will be here today. 1300 01:41:01,329 --> 01:41:06,070 And then I am gone for the rest of the week, but I will be looking at emails so you can 1301 01:41:06,070 --> 01:41:08,599 send me emails and we can discuss things. 1302 01:41:08,599 --> 01:41:08,909 OK.