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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.
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.
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.
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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.