Monday, April 13, 2009

Disasters, accidents and incidents...

I came across this chart on one of my favorite space geek sites - CollectSpace.com - which was pretty fascinating and a bit scary too. The chart shows all the major space disasters resulting in crew deaths, injuries, aborts and a lot of other things that were probably not known about.
The gray boxes are Russian, white are United States, yellow is very bad since that resulted in the loss of the entire crew, gray stripes is some kind of bad thermal issue...and so on (there is a key to the colors on the chart).
Some interesting ones - Soyuz 18-1 had an abort during a second stage problem, Apollo 11 nearly got stuck on the moon with a broken circuit breaker (I read about this once and Buzz stuck a pen cap in the breaker to allow the engine to light), and look at all the stuff dropped on EVAs during shuttle missions!
Click on the chart to download and view it. Pretty interesting, and frightening. Hopefully, this won't be updated with more yellow.

(Click to view full chart 2.5 meg .jpg)

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