Heeding a lesson from history, designers of a new generation of U.S. rockets will include escape systems to give crew members a fighting chance of surviving launch accidents such as the one that felled an unmanned Orbital Sciences Antares rocket on Tuesday.
The U.S. space agency NASA bypassed escape systems for the now-retired space shuttle fleet, believing the spaceships to be far safer than they turned out to be. The illusion was shattered on Jan. 28, 1986, when gas leaking from a solid-fuel booster rocket doomed the shuttle Challenger and its seven crew about 72 seconds after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Taking a page from the design books for the 1960s-era Mercury and Apollo capsules, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's next manned spaceship, Orion, will include a rocket-powered tower attached to the top of the spacecraft that can separate from a troubled launch vehicle and parachute the crew to safety.