Methane? It’s KEROSENE
Loathe as I am to say this, he’s right: the fuel for Starship is not kerosene, it’s methane with liquid oxygen as an oxidizer. Not that methane and its combustion products don’t have their own negative impacts: they are potent greenhouse gases, after all.
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Well, except for the explicit refusal to build a flame trench, among other BS…
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Hear Hear! These facilities improve nature preserves so much, making them so friendly to living things we’re going to have to put up big fences to keep the people out too! I mean, that wildlife sure knows a good thing when they see / hear it!
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One of the reasons for that may be this from Observer:
However, the FWS has not found any dead birds or other wildlife in the natural habitat near the launch site. The area surrounding Starbase is part of a National Wildlife Refuge property, where some endangered species of migratory birds, including piping plover, come for nesting each spring. Before last week’s launch, biologists had already noticed a decline in nesting activities in the area since SpaceX began regularly testing Starship prototypes in 2020.
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Is methane a poisonous gas?
Methane gas is relatively non-toxic; it does not have an OSHA PEL Standard. Its health affects are associated with being a simple asphyxiant displacing oxygen in the lungs.
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Well, we’ve always got the option of letting the other evil tech billionaire build his version… Bezos would love a shot at it. Man, these guys are really making me like Boeing a lot more, and Boeing just killed hundreds of people through value engineering on the 737-Max.
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How about we just stop letting billionaires control everything?
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I’ll bet someone inside of SpaceX decided to promote that as self-snark… there was a plant engineer for NYPA who was widely regarded as an absolute idiot, but was liked by managment. So one of the not-so-popular but much more competent engineers told him to comment on this as “the normal failure mode for an oil filled circuit breaker.” What you’re seeing here is a mushroom could 1000 feet tall, as filmed from across the St Lawrence in Canada… and this spokestwit never lived this down. When the managers are too fucking stupid to know when you’re fucking with them, you can have all sorts of fun.
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Only with complete, stoichiometric combustion. Startup is always messier and explosive combustion messier still, especially in the presence of polymers and metals.
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i hear the cost of area real estate is rocketing…
Despite extensive ground testing, NASA got very lucky with the Saturn V.
The second flight of the rocket, SA-502 (Apollo 6) experienced extremely violent pogo in its first stage that nearly caused the loss of the vehicle and did damage the upper stages. The second stage had other problems including an early engine shut-down and electrical shorts which meant it couldn’t be restarted. Had they occurred on a manned flight, the abort system would almost certainly have been triggered.
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You’ve made a great point.
If they were already in the process of upgrading the pad with a deflector and cooling they must have known there was a non-zero chance of causing serious damage to the rocket. SpaceX employs some of the smartest people in the industry, but they can all be outvoted by a man with a juvenile sense of humour.
And this setback means that the Moon landings will be delayed even further. I bet NASA is quietly furious that SpaceX didn’t take proper precautions to safeguard the rocket and pad.
Liquid-fuelled engines tend to burn very slightly fuel rich to eliminate the possibility of having excess hot oxidiser run rampant with the materials of the engine. That’s why kerolox rockets leave a slightly sooty trail.
Having said that, last week’s launch was very much engine-rich.
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And the explosion creates a crap-ton of incomplete combustion products due to heterogeneity of the reaction conditions.
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Well shit, then the only alternative is to the the engineers actually engineer things without interference, and that will never do.
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I’m a little disappointed we’ve come all this way and no one has mentioned the hilarious and scary ‘Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants’ by John Drury Clark with sections given over to prospective propellants that were once seriously considered, and occasionally test fired - including fluorine, ozone, and - my personal nightmarish favourite - methyl mercury.
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I worked two Summers for NYC-based plants, one being Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, and the other being Newtown Creek Water Treatment Plant. I can verify that the plants’ leadership did not appear to be bright. Basically, they were forever-frowning stiffs in suits… but I did get to learn a lot about big pumps and big valves from the engineers there.
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I’ll bet you saw all sorts of shit.
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Musk couldn’t do it?! More rotten meat for the “All Moon Landings Faked” crowd.
