Apollo (spacecraft) - Launch Escape System (LES)

Launch Escape System (LES)

See also: Apollo abort modes

The Apollo launch escape system was built by the Lockheed Propulsion Company. Its purpose was to pull the Command Module (which contained the crew cabin) away from the launch vehicle in an abort. The emergency could be a pad fire, exploding launch vehicle or a launch vehicle going off course.

The Launch Escape System would work automatically (or through manual activation) to fire a solid fuel escape rocket and open a canard system to direct the Command Module away from, and off the path of, a launch vehicle in trouble. The Launch Escape System would then jettison and the Command Module would land with its parachute recovery system.

If the emergency happened on the launch pad, the Launch Escape System would lift the Command Module to a sufficient height to allow the recovery parachutes to deploy safely before coming in contact with the ground.

In the absence of an emergency, the LES was routinely jettisoned about 20 or 30 seconds after the launch vehicle's second-stage ignition. (Abort modes after this point would be accomplished without the LES.) The jettison motor was a separate solid fuel rocket manufactured by the Thiokol Chemical Company.

Read more about this topic:  Apollo (spacecraft)

Famous quotes containing the words launch, escape and/or system:

    “I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
    The only son is dead.

    But the mother needs to be better,
    She with thin form presently drest in black,
    By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
    In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
    O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and
    withdraw,
    To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—”indoctrination” we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
    —Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)