Even NASA has to Bow to Physics - A Seriously Write Blog

Living here in Central Florida, we get a great deal of news about NASA, Spacex, and the International Space Station. Probably more than the rest of the country only because on a clear day or night, we can see the launches from Cape Canaveral in the sky to our east. Even seventy miles away. They are spectacular, especially at night. And as you might imagine, people travel from all around, setting up chairs, tents, and even campers along the coast to view the orange glow of the rockets.

As the intro to Star Trek said many times, space is the Final Frontier. The Wild, Wild West of the future. However, regardless of how spectacular a launch is, regardless of whether or not they are attempting a never-been-done-before experiment, the laws of physics still reign supreme. This is why NASA conducts test after test. They just had a Dragon capsule leave the ISS and return to Earth. One of the tests was to simulate trouble with the booster rocket and have it detach from the capsule safely. The capsule was to continue its descent into the Atlantic Ocean, to be retrieved, while the booster rocket was to break apart and disintegrate as it burned up entering the atmosphere.

Why would NASA and Spacex conduct such a test? The main reason is because they wanted to simulate a manned flight. If a capsule containing astronauts was on its return voyage from the ISS and the booster rocket malfunctioned, could they separate the two in order to protect the crew? If the rocket blows up, accelerates into the Earth’s atmosphere at breakneck speed, ignites at the wrong time and wrong angle of trajectory and propels them in the wrong direction, say towards Alpha Centauri, then the crew, in any of these scenarios, is as good as dead.


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