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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.
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"
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.
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..."
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.