About: Rubber room (bunker)   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

The bunker itself was circular in shape with a domed ceiling. Contoured seats, large enough for a fully suited astronaut, ringed the perimeter of the room. Also inside the room were fire blankets, and supplies to sustain the occupants for 24 hours. Charts on the wall gave guidance to the occupants as to when to light oxygen candles to replenish breathable oxygen, and when to change the CO2 scrubbers to remove excess carbon dioxide from the air. A radio link was available for communication with rescuers and responders. A toilet was installed behind one of the seats.

AttributesValues
rdfs:label
  • Rubber room (bunker)
rdfs:comment
  • The bunker itself was circular in shape with a domed ceiling. Contoured seats, large enough for a fully suited astronaut, ringed the perimeter of the room. Also inside the room were fire blankets, and supplies to sustain the occupants for 24 hours. Charts on the wall gave guidance to the occupants as to when to light oxygen candles to replenish breathable oxygen, and when to change the CO2 scrubbers to remove excess carbon dioxide from the air. A radio link was available for communication with rescuers and responders. A toilet was installed behind one of the seats.
sameAs
dcterms:subject
dbkwik:nasa/proper...iPageUsesTemplate
abstract
  • The bunker itself was circular in shape with a domed ceiling. Contoured seats, large enough for a fully suited astronaut, ringed the perimeter of the room. Also inside the room were fire blankets, and supplies to sustain the occupants for 24 hours. Charts on the wall gave guidance to the occupants as to when to light oxygen candles to replenish breathable oxygen, and when to change the CO2 scrubbers to remove excess carbon dioxide from the air. A radio link was available for communication with rescuers and responders. A toilet was installed behind one of the seats. The concrete floor was floating, supported by springs and shock absorbers. Once seated and strapped into the contoured seats, this design would protect the occupants from the forces generated by the explosion of the rocket on the hardstand above, estimated by NASA engineers to be a fireball meter (ft) wide, which would burn for 40 seconds, reaching temperatures of . The bunker could withstand a blast pressure of pound per square inch (kPa) and 75G of acceleration. The exit from the bunker was through a -meter () long tunnel, in reality a large air duct, that opened to the outside at the perimeter of the pad. In the event that this route was blocked, there was an emergency escape hatch in the roof of the dome. The rubber room was primarily intended for use by pad workers during fueling and terminal count operations, though a mechanism was in place for the crew of the rocket to use it as well. A high-speed elevator would bring the astronauts from the -foot () level of the launch tower to the surface level of the pad in under 30 seconds. From there, they would use the slide chute as normal to bring them to the bunker. This was the third available escape route for the astronauts, the first being the launch escape system on the rocket itself, and the second being a slide-wire that the crew would use from the top of the rocket to slide to a point well away from the pad. After the Apollo era ended, the rubber rooms fell into disrepair. Water pooled in the bunkers and the exit tunnels, and several species of Florida wildlife took up residence. When the launch pads were refurbished for the Space Shuttle, the bunkers were classified as "abandoned in place" rather than refurbished with the pad above. As of 2012, the pad B room was closed due to lead paint risks, but the pad A room remains accessible. When NASA leased pad A to SpaceX in 2014, the terms of the lease included a requirement that the rubber room, among other historic portions of the pad, be preserved as historical artifacts.
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software