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NASA Wants Green Rocket Fuel
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking for technology that could offer green rocket fuel alternatives to the highly toxic fuel hydrazine used to fire up most rockets today. According to NASA: 'Hydrazine is an efficient and ubiquitous propellant that can be stored for long periods of time, but is also highly corrosive and toxic.' It is used extensively on commercial and defense department satellites as well as for NASA science and exploration missions."
NASA is wasting time and money on this crap?
Everybody should read one book about rocket propellants: Ignition! by John D. Clark. Apart from it being a good (and hilarious at times) read, it'll also show you why this project will most likely end up being a waste of money.
But when it burns it doesn't create any green house gasses. since it contains nothing but nitrogen and hydrogen. Its also naturally occurring, so it can't be that bad can it?
Green fuel.. I mean seriously, who came up with that term anyway? I had a good laugh when i saw the headline. I laughed till the tears would not come anymore.
The laugh is over now and I'm irritated with the way people use "green" insteadt of "environmentally friendly" for in the end, that is really what you want to say!
The environment is anything but green! From space, even the planet looks blue! The Earth itself looks brown, but that's all beside the point. The point is if you mean something, say it! Don't say what you don't mean and expect people to believe you're really serious about being understood.
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Nitrous oxide fuel blend is a mixed mono propellent that's non-toxic and has 320-340s ISP. Max Vozoff, formerly of SpaceX, talks about NOFB in this episode of The Space Show. He think's it's a game changer.
I guess if I was one of the technical crew who had to work with this stuff and be exposed to its toxicity, I'd be welcoming my boss researching a way of making my life safer. I'm sure the technicians love working for NASA but given the choice between working with highly toxic fuels that might burn them/ give them cancer/ other nice side effect, or something less damaging, I am sure they'd be all in favour of an option that won't harm them and won't potentially leak into local water tables, get drawn up into local water supply / agriculture and end up in their kids.
My experience is the people most likely to moan about health and safety are those whose greatest risk of an industrial injury is stabbing themselves with the office stapler. Folk working in genuinely high risk environments seem quite grateful their bosses have to abide by regulations.
Put a politician in the engine and set him to Campaign and he will spew a continuous stream of rhetoric that will slowly accelerate the ship to near light speed.
I don't know if you've ever tried to obtain Halon lately but you'll find even if your system is still grandfathered it's nigh on impossible to get hold of, they've pretty much stopped making it. It's the same with the CFC's used by the shuttle's foam, being allowed to make it didn't mean the raw components are easy to come by. If they'd wanted to continue using CFCs they'd have to had to pay for a supply line to be available and maintained, whether they needed a lot or a little. The problem wasn't that they went green, the problem was that the alternative they chose wasn't the right one and they didn't want to invest the time and money working around that properly.
Going Green is probably just an excuse here, it's the money. Because it's toxic and corrosive it's hard to handle and thus expensive to handle. First you have the expensive equipment and protective gear, and then we have the paperwork... Think about it this way, every time you use the stuff you're generating reams and reams of risk assessments and paperwork. That paperwork is essentially a writeonly document which has to be produced everytime they come up with a slightly different way to do things.
Just in time for St. Patrick's Day
LOX and LOH are not hypergolic. Hydrazine and various nitrogen compounds are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant
Handy not having to bring matches into orbit.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If NASA wants their rocket fuel to be green, all they have to do is add a whole lot of green food dye to the tanks before filling them!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
When I was at school, one of the exam questions in S level chemistry was to estimate the maximum temperature reached if a stream of hydrazine hydrate was mixed with a stream of concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Of course, after the exam we had to try it... two carefully aimed pipettes over the centre of the biggest Belfast sink in the lab, three quarters full of cold water. I'm not disclosing how we released the liquids safely. If you can work it out, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here. There was a white glow at the centre. I guess nowadays with the fear of terrorists no school exam would dare ask the question, whereas in those days I suspect the exam setter thought "Well, if they've done the work for S level, they deserve a little entertainment."
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Antimatter
It gives the best power to weight of any fuel
Antimatter is the most fantastically expensive rocket fuel ever conceived of short of pure leprechaun farts. It takes a stupid amount of energy to make even a few atoms of the stuff. The mind boggles at the amount of power (and hence cost) involved in making kilograms of it (let alone tonnes). It would also be desperately dangerous to handle.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Challenger blew up because one of the O-ring seals failed in a SRB due to an unexpected susceptability to prolonged low-temperature conditions. Nothing to do with asbestos.
Tidied up the quote a bit, since it's delectable:
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
Also, I'd like to also state my thanks to imbaczek for posting the link, 40 pages in and it's a page-turner :)
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Hmm... Maybe NASA should look into corporate sponsorship as a funding source.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Republicans love toxic chemicals.
I don't think so. I especially DON'T think that "green" means "non-toxic to humans who handle it carelessly".
It seems to me that a "green" anything is something whose production, use, and disposal does not use up environmental capital faster than the biosphere replaces it. Alternatively, you can think of it as something whose entire life-cycle, cradle to grave, does not disturb any environmental equilibria except possibly on a highly localized scale (i.e. the footprint of the production facility).
Perhaps the best way to think of green technology is that it contributes to our species' ability to live within its means. That means natural resources, not dollars. Nature doesn't care how we shift dollars around; that's really just an internal control mechanism. It does "care" if we take fish out of the sea faster than they can reproduce, or if we discharge substances into a river faster than the natural processes can absorb and use them. The substances in question might well be "natural" materials like sewage. Discharged into a creek fast enough to alter that stream's chemistry, even *pure distilled water* might reasonably be regarded as a pollutant. It's not just the toxicity to *us* that matters in these cases; it's the damage to functioning ecosystems. "Pollutant" is a *role* a substance plays in certain circumstances, not a fixed category of substances.
DDT does not function as a pollutant when used in domestic (in-house) applications. Nor is it particularly toxic to humans. Used in agriculture or mosquito control it is a serious pollutant because of an important aspect of the way the DDT molecule interacts with the environment: ecosystems have not evolved to use DDT or any of the substances it breaks down into. So DDT and its by-products accumulate in the environment faster than the environment can transform them into benign substances; fast enough that they bio-accumulate up the food chain. The animals at the apex of the food chain are not at all sensitive to the ambient quantities of DDT byproducts in the environment, but the concentration of those by-products is far higher in the animals they predate upon.
So how does hydrazine stack up? Well, unlike DDT hydrazine *is* created and consumed by natural biological processes -- ubiquitous ones at that. It is produced by yeasts, fungi and bacteria as they digest ammonia. Therefore it is *likely* that the environment can process occasional releases of hydrazine, or even continual releases of a diluted streams of hydrazine. Of course given that hydrazine in modest concentrations is acutely toxic, any process involving it should to be examined closely and designed to be environmentally and occupationally safe. Likewise, the materials from which hydrazine is synthesized have similar properties of being ubiquitous in low levels in natural environmental processes. Some of those materials pose occupational and environmental risks, but only if handled carelessly. With reasonable care, it should be possible to produce and use hydrazine responsibly.
So hydrazine looks potentially quite "green" to me. What we have to be wary of is the possibility of adopting a *pseudo-green* alternative to hydrazine, one that might be less acutely toxic to humans while posing a greater risk of environmental damage.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Au Contraire - the susceptibility to cold was perfectly understood by the engineers.
Management is another story, but the engineers knew what the consequences of launching in conditions that cold would be. (see Roger Boisjoly)
The "EPA asbestos ban caused Challenger!" story is every bit as much BS as the "CFC-free foam caused Columbia!" story. The material used on Challenger still contained asbestos, just as the failed foam on Columbia's fuel tank was made with CFCs. Read James Oberg's explamation here:
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/myths-about-challenger-shuttle-disaster
Myth #5: Environmental ban led to weaker sealant
A favorite of the Internet, this myth states that a major factor in the disaster was that NASA had been ordered by regulatory agencies to abandon a working pressure sealant because it contained too much asbestos, and use a weaker replacement. But the replacement of the seal was unrelated to the disaster â" and occurred prior to any environmental ban.
Even the original putty had persistent sealing problems, and after it was replaced by another putty that also contained asbestos, the higher level of breaches was connected not to the putty itself, but to a new test procedure being used. âoeWe discovered that it was this leak check which was a likely cause of the dangerous bubbles in the putty that I had heard about," wrote physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the Challenger investigation board.
And the bubble effect was unconnected with the actual seal violation that would ultimately doom Challenger and its crew. The cause was an inadequate low-temperature performance of the O-ring seal itself, which had not been replaced.
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