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Who'd be mad enough to start a 'large-scale fire' in a spaceship?
- mikro2nd 11y agoAnd here I was expecting to read about Anthropogenic Climate Change on spaceship Earth.
- dredmorbius 11y agoNot from the Denialist Register you weren't.
- justin66 11y agoSince The Register sucks, they don't mention that Mir experienced a fire and, presumably, NASA managed to learn a little from that.
- krallja 11y agoThere have also been many small-scale fire experiments on ISS, such as the Flame Extinguishment Experiment http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/666.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experimen...
- gvb 11y agoRef: http://www.universetoday.com/100229/fire-how-the-mir-incident-changed-space-station-safety/ http://www.universetoday.com/100229/fire-how-the-mir-inciden... ...which has a link to a very interesting PDF detailing the incident: https://nsc.nasa.gov/SFCS/SystemFailureCaseStudy/Details/81 https://nsc.nasa.gov/SFCS/SystemFailureCaseStudy/Details/81
- justin66 11y agoThanks. I haven't seen this, I did read about the incident in Brian Burrough's Dragonfly.
- chiph 11y agoWhat's the oxygen content and pressure of the capsule? The pure oxygen environment at 16 psi of Apollo 1 meant that the fire was over in seconds, and that nearly everything burned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
- Trisell 11y agoYes, but that fire still happened in earth gravity. They main statement says they are interested in a large scale zero gravity fire. Fire has been shown to burn differently without gravity. Take a look at how a candle burns in space compared to in your home.
- oddeyed 11y agoISS atmosphere tries to be similar to earth's - 101kPa, about 20% O2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_ECLSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_ECLSS
- david-given 11y agoThat's only a partial pressure of 20 kPa of oxygen. The Apollo capsule was supposed to be 20 kPa of pure oxygen, so providing the same partial pressure, but because they were on the ground they couldn't do that or the spacecraft would be crushed by exterior atmospheric pressure (<tangent> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4RLOo6bchU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4RLOo6bchU </tangent>). So instead they pressurised it to one atmosphere. Of pure oxygen, thus providing a partial pressure of 110 kPa of oxygen...
- PaulHoule 11y agoThey used to have them on Mir all the time.
- njharman 11y agoStupid headline, but interesting experiment and great example of gaining use out of something considered "throw away".
- morley 11y agoIt's strange to see The Register posted here so frequently, since I imagine a link from the NY Post or Daily News would be removed immediately out of concerns for bias.
- jkot 11y agoLarge scale fire on spaceship already happened on Mir. Most critical problem is still present on ISS today. There is a single route to escape capsules, which could be blocked by the fire.
- mchahn 11y agoCool. Setting off a bomb would be even cooler.