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Wildfire at Vandenberg Air Force Base Threatens ULA, SpaceX Launches (latimes.com)
Longtime Slashdot reader Bruce Perens writes: A fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast -- currently over 10,000 acres in size -- has approached the pads used by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. No structures have been damaged, but power lines have been destroyed. There is about 1000 feet of firebreak around each pad, but the presence of smoke and the absence of electrical power is potentially a problem for rockets, payloads, and ground-support equipment. The WorldView 4 satellite, a Delta 4 rocket, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with at least 7 (potentially 11) Iridium satellites are known to be on site. Ground support equipment at the base constitutes the United States' only access to polar orbit for large rockets without overflying populated areas. Liquid oxygen stored on the site may already have been released as a precaution or boiled off, and there are large supplies of rocket fuel, but these have so far not been a hazard. The Soberanes fire near Big Sur, located 180 miles farther South on the California coast, has gone on for two months, burning 185 square miles and costing over $200 million dollars to fight with no end in sight. Obviously, it's dry out there. The fire forced officials to cancel the Atlas V rocket launch on Sunday, and the next attempt won't occur for a week.
Man SpaceX just can't catch a break. Two nasty explosions (One on the damn pad) and now serious danger of fire damage to launch facilities, although I assume the pad itself is probably pretty safe ( I mean what can a bush fire do that a rocket engine exploding to pieces cant , right? )
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
And, with the drought, they don't have any water to put it out. (Yes, I know Vandenberg is ocean-adjacent. I was making a joke.)
If the brush fire has plans to limit itself to existing within the combustion chambers and expansion nozzles then that's an excellent point!
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
C"mon, we're talking 10000 acres here. 4000 hectares for those who can't be bothered to learn more than one way to measure things. The USA, currently, has something like 750 million acres of forest (300M hectares). So this 10K acres amounts to 0.00133% of the US forest land. Assuming the entire 10K acres is/was forest.
Oh, and Falcon doesn't use H2-O2. It uses Kerosene & LOX. And if there were 1000 Falcon launches annually, the pollutants released would still be rather lower than NYC's annual commuter traffic.
Yes, I know it's fashionable to hate on Musk. But he's not destroying the world, he's not taking food from the mouths of babies, he's not making things worse for anyone (except possibly ULA and the Russians)...
IOW, chill.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Err, its *currently* 10K acres burning. There are 180+ square miles already burnt. And so what if even that is a small percentage, its not small if you live near there or have been affected.
FWIW I'm not hating on Musk, I just think people should get their priorities of things to be concerned about in order.
1) Falcon 9 is entirely LOX / RP-1, not LOX / LH
2) Who do you think owns SpaceX's competitors, starving orphans?
3) You're sitting here writing this enjoying the fruits of the orbital launch market (communications, gps, monitoring satellites, etc) while damning it. That last satellite that SpaceX lost? Most of its communications channels were allocated to providing remote areas of Africa internet service, trying to uplift a continent. But... damn them!
4) The amount of CO2 released by a Falcon 9 launch is roughly the equivalent of one transpacific flight of a 747. Which do you think does more good, a single transpacific flight or a typical satellite? Or in some cases, many satellites - the Iridium cluster for example is launched half a dozen or more at a time. They launch 6-9 per year. Think 6-9 transpacific 747 flights per year is even remotely in the ballpark of relevance in terms of global CO2 emissions?
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
I realize there are other reasons, but I initially found it funny that fire getting near a launch pad was threatening it. I was thinking, "Don't these things get bathed in fire, every time they're used? Shouldn't they have that whole 'flame retardant' thing figured out by now?"
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
FWIW I'm not hating on Musk, I just think people should get their priorities of things to be concerned about in order.
Many fires have happened in the past, and many more are likely to happen in the future.
Overall it doesn't really have a major impact on the world.
But what SpaceX are attempting to do has the potential (at very least) to bring about significant changes to the history of space travel.
"But what SpaceX are attempting to do has the potential (at very least) to bring about significant changes to the history of space travel."
I seriously doubt that. Lauching might become cheaper but thats all. Until a completely new type of space drive system is invented that doesn't rely on chucking mass backwards to move forwards humans won't be going much further than the moon again anytime soon. Even trips to mars are a pipe dream due to it being a one way trip.
>It uses Kerosene & LOX
Salmon propels rockets? I never knew.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Maybe they did, but the map was upside down.
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Actually, salmon wouldn't be a bad choice for a fish-based rocket. It's a fatty fish, and fats burn well in hybrid rockets.
You of course couldn't have a kerosene and salmon rocket, since you need to burn the fish with an oxidizer. But you could have a lox-LOX rocket ;)
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
I seriously doubt that. Lauching might become cheaper but thats all.
And that's basically everything that has ever happened that took something from esoteric parlour trick to technology we can't live without.
E.g. it wasn't Gutenberg that ushered in the era of the printed word, it was the steam printing press. That enabled a whole new medium where words could be printed cheaply enough to be thrown away after just one reading. Whole new ball game.
Space launch is pretty much the same. What's holding us back today is cost. With lower cost many interesting things will happen. Whether cost can ever be brought down to levels that will enable a paradigm shift, that's of course still undecided, but 50% here and 50% there, before you know it, launch could become cheap.
But if you're not willing to settle for anything less than Star Trek (reactionless drive is pretty much that), then of course Musk won't be able to hold a candle to that.
Stefan Axelsson
"But what SpaceX are attempting to do has the potential (at very least) to bring about significant changes to the history of space travel."
I seriously doubt that. Lauching might become cheaper but thats all. Until a completely new type of space drive system is invented that doesn't rely on chucking mass backwards to move forwards humans won't be going much further than the moon again anytime soon. Even trips to mars are a pipe dream due to it being a one way trip.
All Henry Ford did was make automobiles cheaper. Clearly that had no real impact on the history of cars.
Once you get costs cheap enough, all sorts of unrealistic things become possible.
Why don't families go to an orbital space station for a holiday? noon could afford it
Are there manufacturing processes that work better in micro-gravity? Yep, but none are currently cost effective.
Why don't we mine asteroids instead of strip-mining earth? it is cheaper to mine on Earth.
etc.
If you make it cheap enough, space will no longer be the domain of governments and the rich, but something everyone can make use of, and there is no telling what people will come up with.
Also, the only reason Mars is currently a one-way-trip is because it is too expensive to launch the materials for a round trip.
Big Sur is North, not South, Oops! Sorry.
The fire is now at 12,000 acres, 45% contained.
Fire is part of the forest ecosystem, to the point that many trees are evolved to need fire to open their seed cones, and other trees are evolved to sprout back from underground after a fire, and fire is needed to open the canopy to new growth and remove debris from the forest floor. Man disrupts the fire cycle by preventing fires to protect property. Thus, when it does burn, you get a big conflagration due to all of the stored fuel. The area where the fire started had not burned in 40 years. Perhaps that was a mistake.
I was at the base on Friday the 16th to see the first attempt at the launch. It's a long drive from Berkeley. There was some smog at the time, perhaps from the Soberanes fire, but no local fires visible. I viewed the launch attempt from Hawk's Nest and drove down Ocean Ave. to Surf Beach later on. That's about as close as you can get to the SpaceX and ULA pads. The area where the fire started is really far within the base gates - not anything an outsider could have gotten to.
Bruce Perens.
Forests need to burn, it's part of their ecology. The problem is that people keep them from burning to protect property, and then when they finally do burn it's a big conflagration with lots of fuel.
Falcon 9 second stages have all successfully de-orbited and modern satellites are required to deorbit at the end of their life or in the case of geosynchronous, enter a higher storage orbit where they aren't a hazard.to anything in an operational orbit.
Planets die of natural causes eventually. Suns too. If any of our ecology is to survive, that will be because of the work to move man off of the planet.
Bruce Perens.
Actually, salmon wouldn't be a bad choice for a fish-based rocket. It's a fatty fish, and fats burn well in hybrid rockets.
You of course couldn't have a kerosene and salmon rocket, since you need to burn the fish with an oxidizer. But you could have a lox-LOX rocket ;)
With a Toro-LOX boost stage for heavy loads.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
C"mon, we're talking 10000 acres here. 4000 hectares for those who can't be bothered to learn more than one way to measure things. The USA, currently, has something like 750 million acres of forest (300M hectares). So this 10K acres amounts to 0.00133% of the US forest land. Assuming the entire 10K acres is/was forest.
Not to mention that wildfires are a natural occurrence, and part of the forest life cycle. If they didn't threaten human stuff, the best thing to do would be to let them (the naturally caused ones, anyway) burn themselves out.
Yes, last time I was there, Big Sur was north of Vandenberg. Maybe these places are so obscure on the Central California Coast that people just don't realize where they are really located.
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Yes it is, as stated in a previous comment.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
Too many visitors don't reads the previous comments, where it has already been pointed out several times that Big Sur is indeed North of Vandenberg. Many more will continue to point this out. Maybe I should keep count. Or maybe there can be a way to score them all redundant.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
Good point. There are lifeforms that have evolved to take advantage of forest fires. And which were pushed close to extinction (in the USA) when our policy was "Forest fire?? Put it out, right now!".
The new Forest Service policy (new to me - some of you are probably young enough that it's been policy all your lives) is to let them burn unless they endanger humans or human property.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"might become cheaper but thats all"
When capitalism works, it works very well.
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That's why they shouldn't have used lunar maps.
Ezekiel 23:20
It was a map produced by Australia...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?