After the Challenger loss, the lack of any bailout option, even one that was unlikely ever to be used, now seemed unacceptable. Because the orbiter was built to be light, not strong, a water landing would have been fatal for both it and the crew. There were a very small number of fringe scenarios in which a survivable failure during the shuttle’s ascent or reentry could occur when it was out of reach of an abort site, with nowhere to land. The commission called to investigate the accident made broad recommendations as to how the shuttle program could be made safer, one of which was that NASA should develop a way for the crew to bail out, if necessary, during the launch phase. That all changed on the morning of January 28, 1986, when, 73 seconds after launch, Challenger broke apart, killing all seven astronauts on board. The only way for the crew to survive an emergency early in their ascent (and even then, only in some circumstances) was to turn the spaceplane around and fly back to Florida-the so-called “return-to-launch-site” abort. The space shuttle was considered reliable enough that having a bailout option was not considered a priority. Some 10,000 feet above the California desert, a Navy parachutist slides down a telescoping pole extended from a C-141 aircraft during tests of the space shuttle escape system.īefore January 1986, such a scenario had barely been contemplated. If they happened to catch a backward glance, they’d see the empty shuttle receding above them, perfectly under control and doomed. For a split second, they would feel a tug on the lanyard tethering them to the pole, their last contact with the vehicle before they slid off into the rushing air. Then, one by one, the astronauts would kneel in the hatch and jump into the equivalent of a 230-mph wind. Wearing compact, 64-pound parachute packs, the rest of the crew would leave their seats, hustle to the hatch, and hook in too. After making his or her way to the hatch, that astronaut would then yank a handle to deploy a nine-foot telescoping pole out into the rushing air, and hook one of seven lanyards attached to the pole to a metal ring on their parachute harness. Provided nothing had gone fatally wrong and the space shuttle could still be maneuvered into a stable glide, the astronauts aboard, who only minutes before had been on their way to orbit, would prepare to parachute into the ocean.Īs the orbiter descended, the commander would set its controls to autopilot and ask the astronaut sitting closest to the outer hatch, on the middeck below, to depressurize the cabin and jettison the hatch. The decision would be made at about 60,000 feet.
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