(reverent orchestral music)
- [Kennedy] We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy
but because they are hard.
- [Narrator] The moon landing was inspiring,
not just because of where we went
but because of how difficult it was to get us there.
To protect the astronauts from the lethal heat of reentry,
a team of women had to apply a brand new type of resin
to 370,000 individuals cells on the Apollo capsule...
Manually.
So, even as spaceflight has inched towards
something for the average person,
as seen in the Inspiration 4 mission,
it's worth remembering that space is still really hard.
These are our missteps so far- - Dagnabbit.
- [Narrator] And the lessons space engineers took from them.
(soft electronic music)
Remember the US space shuttle?
It was a technological marvel,
the first reusable spacecraft with a launch system,
shuttle, boosters, and fuel tank,
comprised of 2.5 million moving parts.
They had to be made to withstand ridiculous speeds,
hypergravity during launch and microgravity in space,
and temperatures with a 2,800-degree swing.
Get this: Of all the moon missions attempted,
40% have been failures
because in something so complex as spaceflight,
there's so much risk at every stage.
- [John] I'm John Logsdon,
professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute,
George Washington University.
At least in principle, these people preparing the equipment
for a spaceflight are scrupulously careful
in making sure that everything works
and the instrumentation tells them
the conditions of the spacecraft.
- [Narrator] Starting with liftoff,
which works on the principle
of Newton's Third Law, action/reaction.
If you ever thought you wouldn't use it, here ya go.
During liftoff, gases and flames push out
from a rocket's engine nozzles, thrusting the vehicle up.
(rocket engines roaring)
But to get beyond the confines of Earth's gravity,
NASA says you need to thrust a lot of weight up
at speeds of around 25,000 mph.
To give you a comparison,
the Concorde supersonic jet only went 1,300.
To get that reaction, you need a lot of action:
a huge, sustained explosion.
- [John] The Apollo launch on the Saturn V
was the equivalent to a small nuclear device
in terms of the amount of energy that had to be controlled.
- [Narrator] Powered by fuel
that you have to carry with you, fuel that is volatile.
It can go off at the wrong time.
In 1960, for instance,
in what remains the deadliest rocket mishap in history,
the ambitious yet pressured Soviet Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin
pushed his engineers to test a new rocket
before an upcoming Soviet anniversary.
But there were known problems:
faulty switches in the electrical system.
Nedelin overruled his engineers
and ordered that the rocket be fixed on the launchpad,
while fueled, as he allegedly watched from a lawn chair.
As forewarned, that electrical system
sent an erroneous signal to part of the engine,
which lit up and ignited the engine block below it.
The ensuing toxic explosion
killed approximately 120 unfortunate souls,
including Nedelin himself.
But even if it starts when you want it to,
you need to control and contain that explosion too.
Sadly, that didn't happen in 1986
in perhaps the most famous space accident in history,
when millions watched the US Shuttle Challenger
break apart in midair.
The culprit was a lowly O-ring on the right booster,
a quarter-inch piece of insulating rubber
between engine segments
that failed due to the abnormally cold temperatures
in Florida on launch day.
Following the failure,
flames erupted from the side of the booster,
which quickly breached the fuel tank.
But the contractors who built the engine
had urged NASA not to launch
because data showed O-ring instability
at even moderately cold temperatures.
In rejecting those calls, NASA, like the Soviets,
showed they were susceptible
to political and deadline pressure.
- Outside of our certification or qualification base.
- [Narrator] Seven people died on the Challenger,
including Christa McAuliffe,
the first would-be citizen astronaut.
- [John] Once you're in space, it's not risk-free,
but it's the least of the three phases
in terms of risks to the crew.
- [Narrator] Maintaining life support
is, of course, complex and occasionally problematic.
If you can believe it, just a two-millimeter gap
in your defenses can threaten lives.
It most recently happened in 2018 when Mission Control
for the International Space Station
noticed something strange:
the station's air pressure was dropping.
They sent the vessel's crew
on an exhaustive search of the facility,
which turned up a two-millimeter hole
in a recently-docked Soyuz capsule.
Chillingly, Russian authorities said the hole was drilled,
either on accident or as an act of sabotage.
It sounds small, but it's nothing to scoff at.
In 1971, a valve in the Soyuz-11 opened while in space,
killing its crew.
They were pioneers:
the first people to ever board the first space station.
But even stuff that's so very necessary for life
can end up being hazardous to it.
The more oxygen there is in an environment,
the more flammable that environment is.
The hotter it burns.
And that was sadly apparent for Apollo 1,
where a highly-pressurized pure-oxygen capsule
erupted into flames during a ground test,
killing three brave astronauts
as they struggled to escape the hatch.
Always conscious of weight,
NASA had chosen a lighter pure oxygen setup
over a heavier nitrogen-oxygen mixture.
And oxygen was again part of the problem
on the infamous Apollo 13 mission.
When damaged wiring caught fire
in one of the vessel's liquid O2 tanks,
the fire spread rapidly in the oxygenated environment,
building up enough pressure to cause an explosion
that not only knocked out all of the oxygen stores
on Apollo 13's command module
but also water, electrical, and propulsion systems too.
- [Astronaut] Houston, we've had a problem.
Thanks to the ingenuity of both crew and control
in solving for these and other space problems
like scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air,
the mission ended safely,
but we shouldn't forget how close it was.
The problems posed by heat and radiation
haven't caused any major incidents yet,
but they're still issues that engineers must correct for,
especially as they look towards longer spaceflights.
Heat doesn't work in space as it does on Earth.
There's nothing to conduct or convect,
leaving just radiation as a means for dissipating heat,
so both instruments and astronauts can overheat.
Outside the Earth's protective atmosphere
and magnetic field, there's the harmful kind of radiation.
Different kinds, actually.
On a given stay in the International Space Station,
an astronaut gets about a hundred times
the radiation we get on Earth
despite radiation shielding built in,
and that'll only get worse beyond our planet's protection.
But some dangers of space aren't even caused
by physics or chemistry.
Just this year, the Russians launched a new science lab
to join the ISS.
A few hours after docking,
the lab's thrusters suddenly fired on their own,
apparently trying to separate from the station body.
Command declared it a spacecraft emergency.
But the US couldn't control the module.
And while the Russians could, they were out of range.
So, the ISS rotated a full 540 degrees around its axis
before it was brought under control,
putting its delicate web of instruments in danger,
even if the crew was safe.
Some astronauts cite drifting off into space
as their greatest fear.
Just imagine if it were because a few lines of faulty code.
Something like that happened in 1999,
when a line of code on the Mars Climate Orbiter
wasn't changed from the imperial system
to its metric equivalent.
So, instead of orbiting Mars as intended,
the craft exploded in its atmosphere.
If only things got easier on return.
- [John] Somehow you have to burn off or dissipate energy
equivalent to that that is used to launch you.
- [Narrator] But that's the stage at which
a slim majority of spaceflight fatalities have occurred.
When a spacecraft traveling at hypersonic speeds
plows into the Earth's atmospheric chowder,
it compresses the air in front of it,
raising temperatures hot enough to melt metal.
Heat shields can deal with some of that,
but only at a certain gradual angle of descent.
Too steep and you run into greater friction.
But of course, the heat shields need to be intact.
In 2003, a piece of foam struck the left wing
of the Space Shuttle Columbia
as it launched on a 16-day mission.
NASA brushed it off.
It was an event that had happened before.
- [John] That's certainly what happened in Columbia.
Things that weren't supposed to happen,
did happen, and didn't hurt you became acceptable.
- [Narrator] But tragically, extreme heat
seeped into the wing through the hole in the heat shield,
eventually breaking up the entire vehicle.
The consensus is that Columbia astronauts
were doomed shortly after their launch,
but some space travelers
may have been doomed long before theirs.
In 1967, Soviet President Brezhnev
so longed for a space victory
for the 50th anniversary of Bolshevism
he sent Vladimir Komarov up in the Soyuz-1 capsule
despite warnings from Yuri Gagarin,
Soviet hero and first man in space,
that the vessel had 203 structural flaws.
Gagarin was right; nothing worked.
According to listening-in US officials,
Komarov felt he was going to die on the now-manual reentry
and discussed how to tell his children with his wife.
And in fact both his capsule's parachutes
failed to deploy properly,
sending him hurtling to Earth at fatal speeds.
Nothing could ever make up for the loss of life,
but it's some comfort that the space industry
has studied them.
NASA even releases reports on the old Soviet disasters.
And technological and operational changes
have been swift after something major has occurred.
After the fire, the Apollo capsule was redesigned
with an outward opening hatch for emergency exits
and made less flammable by adjusting materials
and reducing oxygen levels.
- Privately to themselves and publicly say
that this truly indeed has really been a beginning,
a beginning of man's, really,
first venture out into deep space.
- [Narrator] The Soyuz capsule that failed Vladimir Komarov
in so many ways has become the reliable workhorse
of space vehicles, with major upgrades to everything,
including, it's worth mentioning, its parachute design.
The Soyuz-11 decompression
also shifted attitudes towards flight suits.
Spacecraft were redesigned to fit them,
crews required to wear them longer on the journey.
And the solid booster rocket
that doomed The Challenger mission was redesigned,
with special attention paid to its previously-faulty joints.
Overall, 200 changes were made
to the shuttle's systems by 1988.
It ended up flying 86 more successful missions.
- [John] The Shuttle Atlantis that flew the last mission,
ST-135 in 2011, was the safest shuttle ever flown.
- [Narrator] But changing human nature
has been more difficult.
- [John] To operate this equipment requires the operator
to be very sharp, to be very sensitive to issues.
And if you lose that sharpness, bad things can happen.
- [Narrator] So, NASA has done everything
from reducing shuttle launches
to providing direct lines for dissenters to speak out to.
- [John] Things like in-person contact with the astronauts
was a way of reminding the flight controllers
and the people on the ground, people in the factories,
that these were human lives that they were dealing with,
requiring the utmost care.
- [Narrator] But our expert said
that the privatization of space
may actually help with the familiar slide into complacency.
- I think when you risk the company every launch,
which these firms in a sense are doing,
it does catch your attention.
- [Narrator] So, as we look towards the next stage
of manned spaceflight,
we should be mindful of the difficulty and the risk,
but also of the quote that launched the space age.
- [Kennedy] We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy
but because they are hard,
because that goal will serve to organize
and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept,
one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.