Author Topic: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE  (Read 8965 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline rdl

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3667
  • Country: us
Re: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
« Reply #100 on: April 28, 2023, 07:20:12 pm »
Fixed.

As long as you ship the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide separately they're no more hazardous than any other toxic, corrosive, and/or carcinogenic industrial chemicals. They are not hypergolic with themselves.

Point being, it takes two to tango.

As long as you ship the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide separately they're no more hazardous than many other industrial chemicals. They are not hypergolic with themselves.
Depends on what you mean by hazardous. Many industrial chemicals like Phosgene are very toxic like hydrazine. They may not necessarily explode but cause fatal accidents nonetheless. Potentially spilling hundreds of tons of very toxic chemical is not the best idea.
 

Offline coppice

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 10035
  • Country: gb
Re: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
« Reply #101 on: April 28, 2023, 10:04:13 pm »
As long as you ship the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide separately they're no more hazardous than any other toxic, corrosive, and/or carcinogenic industrial chemicals. They are not hypergolic with themselves.
Great. That'll make people on the transport routes feel so much more at ease. :)

Most hypergolic fuels are seriously corrosive, but sit in satellites for years to do their occasional positional corrections. Does anyone know what materials they use for tanks, pipes, valves and so on to tolerate this?
 

Offline rdl

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3667
  • Country: us
Re: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
« Reply #102 on: April 28, 2023, 10:45:27 pm »
It would be interesting to know. Here is an interesting anecdote.

I worked for most of my life in the industrial coatings business. I mostly formulated clear finishes for wood. A common finish system used for kitchen cabinets required an acid catalyst (PTSA). To ship this by air was a pain, regulations required multiple layers of packaging because it was "corrosive". One day, annoyed after having to pack and ship some of this stuff and somewhat curious, I wadded up a ball of aluminum foil (aluminum, what airplanes are made of) and dropped it in a bottle of PTSA. Nothing really happened. So I screwed the lid on and set it aside.

Two years later the wad of aluminum foil was still shiny, sitting in it's bottle of "corrosive" PTSA.
 

Offline james_s

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 21611
  • Country: us
Re: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
« Reply #103 on: April 28, 2023, 10:48:06 pm »
Doesn't mean it's not corrosive. If you put an iron nail or your finger in the bottle you might get different results.
 

Offline rdl

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3667
  • Country: us
Re: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
« Reply #104 on: April 28, 2023, 11:09:54 pm »
Well yeah. The point is there's degrees to everything. Don't assume because IATA says it's corrosive that it can dissolve an airplane.

For the record, PTSA does almost nothing to human parts. It will leach iron into the finish which can eventually cause discoloration (your pretty white kitchen cabinets may eventually turn a bit purple).

 

Offline switchabl

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 445
  • Country: de
Re: Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
« Reply #105 on: May 03, 2023, 12:27:58 pm »
So, I was a bit puzzled at the time that they waited so long to terminate when they had clearly lost control... well, turns out the FTS failed: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html

Yikes! There's going to be a few awkward question, not just about the failure itself but also about the risk assessment they submitted to get it approved in the first place.
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf