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The fuel lines aren't plug-and-play rubber hoses—they're cleanroom-welded exotic metals that pipe toxic, explosive fuels that corrode (and can explode on contac
by perihelions 2y ago
The fuel lines aren't plug-and-play rubber hoses—they're cleanroom-welded exotic metals that pipe toxic, explosive fuels that corrode (and can explode on contact with) most materials. Remember the SpaceX Dragon craft that blew up on a test stand? That was a failure of their analogous subsystem–hypergolic oxidizer ignited a valve, which was machined from solid titanium, and exploded.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-crew-dragon-explosion-titanium-fire/ https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-crew-dragon-explosion-titan... ("SpaceX says Crew Dragon capsule exploded due to exotic titanium fire")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445725
I don't think it's practical to try to make this part user-serviceable.
- nonethewiser 2y agoJust an aside, but im amazed they can even reliably pinpoint the root cause for these explosions. How do they do this? Some mixture of live sensor data and just general intuition (oh the explosion started here and we know x is a limiting factor, etc)?.
- dotnet00 2y agoThey have a lot of sensors on everything, plus they'd be filming from a lot of angles, and the additional benefit of ground testing is that they can look at the debris. You can piece together where the explosion happened based on the charring and where the parts broke and how. If I recall correctly, the Dragon explosion was especially interesting because the reaction was previously unknown. So, it wasn't just a design flaw that allowed NTO to leak into a helium line, it was also a new discovery that titanium can react with NTO under high pressure and ignite.
- Intralexical 2y agoFour microphones will let you pinpoint the location of any sound in a 3D volume. I'm sure they have more sensors than that.