You can’t get the fuel since 9/11. Totally not kidding.
“It’s sooooo handy.”
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For a second there I wacky parsed that lower right appendage as holding a circular saw blade.
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It might have been a victim of improved communications. If you don’t need to send a person, there is little need for devices like that.
Whatever the incident is, “too soon” should have a threshold of about 100 milliseconds.
You have to concentrate it yourself now.
A thought I am nurturing is a small but scalable electrochemical reactor, where water is put in as the feedstock, goes through the electrochemical cell, and the produced peroxide is distilled away and then concentrated to the desired level, in a continuous fashion.
There was also the LESS (Lunar Escape Systems) designed for Apollo. Which never got sent up.
Basically a two-man hypergolic scooter. The thing was a contingency in case the LEM’s engines got damaged or it otherwise couldn’t be used to meet up with the CSM.
The plan was: Strap onto the LESS, spot the CSM approaching off in the distance and fire the engines hell-bent-for-leather to get up to the same altitude as it and go as fast as it’s going.
Basic Kerbal Space Program stuff.
Imagine launching into orbit sitting on what amounts to an exploding bicycle and ride it all the way up to the ship taking you home.
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Obviously that Imperial probe droid is just collecting intelligence. These are not the dishes you’re looking for. Move along.
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I’d recommend you read this, especially the comment thread, before you start distilling peroxides.
At the rocket motor factory where I used to work, the production buildings had blowout walls and were kept far enough apart that it made sense to lease the space in between to farmers, to grow crops. You can make your own blowout wall if you have a garage… cheap blowout walls typically can’t be insulated so you don’t want them on an airconditioned or heated space, but you can put one right behind your garage door and leave the door open when you’re distilling or working with the peroxide. The wall will keep dust and debris out of your distillery, but if you blow up, the blast will be directed and is less likely to kill your neighbors or level your house.
We wore thick green denim lab coats and blue jeans around live fuels, although personally I never worked with hypergolics. My normal daily wear has too much exposed leather to be anywhere near high-test peroxides.
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Derek, the king of chemical prose! I love that blog, but the “things I won’t work with” section is updated with painfully low frequency, compared to the richness of deserving compound in the barren, craters-pockmarked landscape of chemistry.
Some sort of blowout panels is a must. May be the said open garage door (or at least open window and working on the windowsill). (Also, what about using styrofoam for said cheap blowout wall?)
Personally, I am a fan of continuous-processing microreactors. The amount of energy stored in each unit can be contained with a sandbag or other absorbing barrier, the units can be parallelized as desired, and you can run them computer-controlled for weeks (instead of having to personally attend to higher volumes for shorter time). A drippy leak in a roof, or in a heating system, or in a faucet, is a testament of power of combination of low flow over long time.
(Another thing I am excitedly waiting for is a 3d printed remote robot manipulator for such little labs. Especially when peroxides are involved.)
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Yes! That principle, exactly.
More accurately, something along this line:
(Possibly even use this project as-is.)
…wrap it in a silicone rubber sleeve, put it into a glovebox, and you can tend your sterile cultures from another country. Or make a boomy stuff without risking more than cheap parts and some printing filament.
…I saw too many missing fingers at my school. (Those were the folks working with peroxides. The other boom-stuff guys looked like heavier-than-tungsten smokers, with their hands yellowed with nitric acid, but typically had the full count of appendages.)
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Yup! But then got sidetracked by looking up the hot cell manipulators… facility decommissioning reports are worse tar pit than tvtropes!
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