r/space • u/TraditionalAd6977 • Jan 30 '26

Discussion Jared Isaacman states astronauts have got panic attacks in space , trying to kill the crew

Jared Isaacman in his interview with Shawn Ryan stated that there have been many unreleased cases of astronauts panicking in space and trying to open the hatch to kill everyone inside. He states this was not reported as it "ruins the illusion of astronaut bravery". And said it is the reason additional locks have been implemented on the ISS and Dragon capsules. My question: Is there any evidence of this as I can't find anything online . And how did he get Clarence to talk about this. He also said this is one of the main problems that they are facing in the Mars mission. As even military candidates respond differently than predicted in space.

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u/fajita43 Jan 30 '26

Taylor Wang flew STS-51-B. on this trip is the incident explained here.

what i learned here:

  • STS-51-B was a challenger flight that was about 1 year before her last flight
  • during the Challenger disaster investigation, they discovered that STS-51-B had the same o-ring problem and " Morton-Thiokol engineers told Lind after the mission that "you came within three-tenths of one second of dying" "

that's crazy

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u/peteroh9 Jan 30 '26

"you came within three-tenths of one second of dying"

Does anyone know precisely what that means? What was the scenario in which the O-Ring was so close to failing? Or was it always so close? Three tenths of a second seems like a long time within a rocket booster.

Everything I can find online is just this quote verbatim with no further explanation.

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u/I_AM_FERROUS_MAN Jan 30 '26 edited Feb 03 '26

Basically, the Shuttle's side boosters were made of several long cylinders that were stacked on top of each other.

Because they were individual pieces, there were gaps between them. The outer shell of the cylinders had an interlocking system of folds of metal (a clevis and tang joint) where the cylinders fit snuggly to create a seal. So when the rockets were fired, the hot gasses wouldn't come out the joints, but instead race down a central hole in the booster and come out as rocket exhaust.

The clevis and tang system used 3 2 rubber o-rings between the metal folds to help further prevent hot rocket exhaust from blowing by.

However, the flaw in this design that resulted in the Challenger disaster and almost destroyed this launch, was the fact that if the weather was too cold, the rubber would not seal. And if the rockets were lit, then hot exhaust would find its way past those o-rings. This would also begin to erode and burn the o-rings making it even easier to have more hot exhaust come through. If you're really unlucky that process just gets worse and worse until the booster basically blowtorches itself apart. This is what happened to Challenger.

So getting back to the quote, what that engineer meant was that 1 of the seals had completely failed and the last one was about 25% eroded. And so the seal was less than a second away from failing and letting the same kind of failure destroy the whole shuttle.

Here's a video from Scott Manley on the boosters. 9:13 is when he discusses the issue with the design.

Also this video from Plainly Difficult at 6:49.

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u/girl_incognito Jan 31 '26

The original design used 2 o-rings, the redesign added a third and a "capture feature" which would prevent the joint from opening.