Updated: 5-30-07
OK can I pay an admission to ride it ? 
it's like a FeeFall face first awesome Space travel has inspired thrill-park rides. Now the reverse is in the works: A new launch pad under design by NASA will include a hair-raising escape system dubbed "the roller coaster."
When the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is completed in 2012, it will include an emergency feature that will allow astronauts to jump into tram cars atop the pad's tower and whiz down a track to safety, NASA's Ruth Gardner says. One design under consideration shows the cars hurtling over a 90-degree cliff before plunging vertically toward the ground ? with the passengers face down.
"'Bizarre' is not the right word. It's just very different," says former astronaut Charles Bolden, a member of a NASA advisory panel on safety. "It let me know that all avenues ? were open. I was encouraged to see it."
NASA is redesigning the launch pad and planning escape routes as it develops a replacement for the space shuttle, which will retire in 2010. The next spaceship, a capsule called Orion, is scheduled to take astronauts to orbit starting in 2015 and eventually to the moon. The Orion isn't built, but its general design is settled, allowing NASA to design a pad and figure out ways to escape.
An illustration of the new escape feature was first posted on the website NASASpaceflight.com.
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The launch pad tower will be 370 feet tall. Even so, the tram cars will whisk crews to safety in only 85 seconds, says Gardner, Kennedy's manager of ground operations planning for the new ship.
The agency talked to roller coaster consultants as it drew up its plans.
"Technology developed for the public thrill-seekers is very applicable here," says Scott Horowitz, head of NASA's effort to return to the moon.
The cars will have a brake that astronauts would release to set the car in motion. Friction rather than the brake might be used to stop the cars, Gardner says.
Astronauts who need to flee the existing launch pad before the shuttle lifts off can climb into an open basket that slides down a wire to a safety bunker. The roller coaster was chosen as a faster way to move more astronauts and other personnel in case of a fire, explosion or other such crisis, Gardner says.
Engineers have not settled on the escape track's path, so it might not bend quite as much as 90 degrees. It will have to curve sharply to get the rescue vehicle away from danger quickly.
If the track is too steep, passengers could be subject to gravitational forces so severe they could black out,
EDIT: ( DID THEY EVER SEE KK AND TTD ) Bolden says. Gardner says the forces won't approach those levels.
Gardner also says the astronauts won't hesitate about jumping into the tram cars, no matter how terrifying the ride.
"You're talking about astronauts that are sitting on a heckuva lot of firepower to get into space," Gardner says. "I don't think in an emergency anyone would have a problem getting on that. I would, given what my choices would be."
www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2007-05-28-nasa-roller-coaster-escape_N.htm?csp=34
Topic: Kennedy Space Center to get new coaster! (Read 1658 times)