Linguofreak
Well-known member
I've been thinking about this particular point a lot today. Does it count as a "successful bail out" when the ship simply disintegrates around you?
And I've been wondering whether this really counts as a spacecraft accident, as everybody keeps saying. Given that the vehicle is not capable of reaching orbit, regardless of its zoom climb capabilities has never left the atmosphere, and was not scheduled to leave the atmosphere on this flight, this really strikes me as more of a mundane aircraft accident (to the extent that accidents with fatalities are ever "mundane").
All that engineering work that went into Apollo-style LES towers that (thankfully) never needed to be used, and the first successful ejection required no real planning at all other than equipping the pilots with parachutes that automatically open.
Those Apollo-style LES towers *did* need to be used. Unfortunately, on January 28th of 1986, we were flying the STS stack instead of Apollo++ on a Saturn IB derivative, and the LES tower was unavailable.