3 ms·
> Fire crews can't approach until the fire burns itself out - too toxic. You're thinking of hypergolic propellants like hydrazine and nitric acid. This is kero
by exDM69 10y ago
> Fire crews can't approach until the fire burns itself out - too toxic.
You're thinking of hypergolic propellants like hydrazine and nitric acid. This is kerosene (RP-1) and liquid oxygen. Not particularly toxic, just hot as hell.
The deluge system in shuttle launches was for the flame trench and sound dampening to avoid the air pressure from the noise damaging the vehicle, not fire extinguishing.
You can see the launch tower get charred black, that's the fire protective paint.
It's not really possible to fight rocket fuel fires, just mitigate the damage.
- Animats 10y agoOh, right; the Falcon second stage is just a smaller version of the first stage.
- mikeash 10y agoAlthough the satellite itself had a lot of hydrazine on board. That's probably what caused the smaller second explosion when the fairing fell off and hit the ground.
- raverbashing 10y agoYes that's my guess as well. 200 million dollar firecracker
- nraynaud 10y agostupid question: is that the actual manufacturing price, or is there some one time R&D and tooling in it?
- mikeash 10y agoSeems like a really good question to me! I'd guess there's some one-time stuff involved, so the replacement won't cost $200 million, but it won't be a whole lot cheaper. My totally uninformed random guess would be something like $100-150 million for the second one. Maybe more, it could be that the one-time stuff is already amortized across multiple satellites.
- taneq 10y agoI wondered the same thing. I can't imagine more than a few million dollars of raw material goes into a satellite. I'd wager it's more like $150mil to design the satellite, then $20mil for parts and $20mil for labour to build it (since these things are so low-volume they've gotta be largely hand made). It'd certainly suck to be one of the people who's slaved over the satellite for the last couple of years, to see your baby get blown to smithereens like this.