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NASA Will Intentionally Burn Unmanned Orbiting Craft In Space (phys.org)
An anonymous reader writes from an article on Phys.org: NASA said it will test the effects of a large fire in space by setting off a blaze inside an orbiting unmanned space craft. NASA has set off tiny controlled fires in space in the past, but never tested how large flames react inside a space capsule in space. The goal is to measure the size of the flames, how quickly they spread, the heat output, and how much gas is emitted. The results of this experiment, dubbed Saffire-1, will determine how much fire resistance is needed in the ultra-light material used in the spacecraft and the astronaut's gear. It will also help NASA build better fire detection and suppression systems for their spaceships, and study how microgravity and limited amounts of oxygen affect the size of the flames.
The goal is to measure the size of the flames, how quickly they spread, the heat output, and how much gas is emitted.
Said every pyro ever.
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Ernest Hemingway
They invented a whole new concept called the "inside". This craft will be equipped with one such feature. It will contain oxygen.
This sounds like one of the more useful things I've ever heard nasa do.
I spent a year or so working on fire detection for the Orion project, which was, at the time, sending folks to the moon. Fire in space is an incredibly arcane subject, with almost nothing known. On Earth, convection is everything, but in space, there is no gravity to drive convection. In other words, hot air doesn't rise. So flames do really weird, unexpected, unintuitive things.
I actually think you could have some really really cool looking massive fireballs in space. If you have a flammable mixture being ejected from a central point and ignition starts from the centre point fractionally after the start of the ejection you would have two expanding fronts. The first would be what ever the flammable mix is, the second is the ignition front chasing it. While the mixture remains dense enough for ignition to spread it would look really really cool.
Obviously flammable mix in a vacuum would require oxygen in some form. I wonder what burning potassium Chlorate would look like in space.
Fire and balls are two words you don't want to be used in a sentence describing your pants.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I just hope they do this in the memory of Grissom, White, and Chaffee. That was one of my first early childhood scars.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
We set a nuke off in space.
Seriously...
You might not know about it so I'll share it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The thing is - they had no fucking idea what it would do, not really. They had some guesses and one guy's theory.
We trashed 7 satellites - some of them not belonging to us, in 1962. Yup... We nuked mother-fucking space, not knowing, based on a scientific guess (that there'd be belts, now known as Van Allan belts I believe), and might have ignited the fucking atmosphere.
The world was PISSED. I mean right fucking pissed. This was in the heart of the Cold War. The USSR was fucking livid. The UK's first satellite? Guess what happened to that... Yeah, it mysteriously stopped working not long after. It was awesome. I was only like five when it happened and even I remember hearing about it. I don't remember if it was then that I remember hearing about it. I might have been older. I didn't see it or anything like that. It's not like they could keep that a secret. No, no... It was pretty noticeable. Someone's gonna notice if you set of a nuke in space.
So, guess what we did after that? We blowed a few more up real good-like. I believe the USSR had a go at it afterwards. At some point, people thought about it and said that it was probably best that we stop attacking space. They were starting to worry that it might be a problem.
I am not kidding. When it goes off - the fireball actually gets larger as it approaches the ground - some of it comes towards the atmosphere, plus it's not truly weightless, it's just really low weight. They had no idea if it was gonna scorch the Earth because they had no idea how long it would keep growing larger - but they had a reasonable guess, it turned out to be right and Van Allen got his data (which was kind of the excuse, as I recall). They named shit after him but I'm not an astronomer or astronomical physics student so I'll be damned if you'll get a good explanation from me if you want details. But, it was generally considered a good idea at the time by the powers that be.
A certain subset, namely those not in power, were pretty sure that everyone had gone insane. You think you hate your government now? Oh my... No, not at all. Imagine a government that will try to attack space, just to show they can do it. They killed satellites that don't belong to us. The UK's very first satellite, a matter of national fucking pride, was a friendly fire incident when the US decided it wasn't to detonate a nuclear bomb... in space... That they weren't sure if it would irradiate the planet in new and horrible ways... And they then decided that wasn't good enough and proceeded to scale that son of a bitch up ever larger. And you're having a hard time accepting Trump or Hillary, aren't you?
KGIII as an AC.
More like the US has set off 10 high altitude nuclear bombs. It just depends on which ones you want to count as space. Starfish Prime was not the furthest out either, one of the earlier ones was at 570km as opposed to the 400km of starfish. That said starfish was a 1.4Mt bomb so it made the biggest impact.
One of the soviet ones managed to push out an EMP measuring in the thousands of amps. It melted hundreds of kms of telephone and power lines and caused a power station to burn to the ground. It went off at about 290km.
I'd expect "gravity free" flames to be more chaotic / less predictable... I wonder how many times they'll have to burn the capsule before they get a representative sample.