Slide 52 of 99
The early Space Station proposals assumed the facility would be equipped with a “safe haven” where the crew would wait for a rescue Shuttle in case of emergency. After the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger accident, it became obvious that some sort of “lifeboat” would have to be added and NASA's Johnson Space Center began examining the alternatives, including refurbishing old unused Apollo lunar capsules from the 1960s! The cheapest options are shown here. The $600-million "Station Crew Return Alternative Module" (SCRAM, left) would have consisted of a heatshield from the Viking Mars probe and a cylindrical 6-man capsule. It would however have produced high G-loads on the crew. An alternate configuration (right) would have been derived from the old US Air Force "Discoverer" recovery capsule. The crew return vehicle version would have been scaled up to accomodate a full Space Station crew of eight astronauts. In 1986 General Electric and NIS Space Ltd. proposed a commercially developed series of such capsules, for unmanned microgravity research as well as Space Station crew rescue.