3 ms·
Possibly. But more likely the thrust from escaping gas will push it in a direction to either slow the orbit down or make it more eccentric and unstable.
by indoordin0saur 9mo ago
Possibly. But more likely the thrust from escaping gas will push it in a direction to either slow the orbit down or make it more eccentric and unstable.
- tlb 9mo agoRight, if there's something like a small hole in a pressure tank, it's very unlikely to be aligned exactly with the CG, so the tank will spin around and the net thrust will be near zero. If a pressure tank splits in half, both halves will fly away but that's a very inefficient way of using the energy in the gas, so the added velocity will be a small fraction of the speed of sound in the gas, which is 1/6 of orbital speed for hydrogen, less for any other gas. You can't really get much of a chemical explosion because the fuel and oxidizer both disperse very quickly in space.