Who'd be mad enough to start a 'large-scale fire' in a spaceship? | Hacker News Reader

Who'd be mad enough to start a 'large-scale fire' in a spaceship?

theregister.co.uk

38 pointsCarolineW15 comments

Stupid headline, but interesting experiment and great example of gaining use out of something considered "throw away".

It'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.

What'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

Yes, 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.

ISS atmosphere tries to be similar to earth's - 101kPa, about 20% O2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_ECLSS

That'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 </tangent>).

So instead they pressurised it to one atmosphere. Of pure oxygen, thus providing a partial pressure of 110 kPa of oxygen...

Since The Register sucks, they don't mention that Mir experienced a fire and, presumably, NASA managed to learn a little from that.

There have also been many small-scale fire experiments on ISS, such as the Flame Extinguishment Experiment http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experimen...

Ref: 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

Thanks. I haven't seen this, I did read about the incident in Brian Burrough's Dragonfly.

Large 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.

Cool. Setting off a bomb would be even cooler.

And here I was expecting to read about Anthropogenic Climate Change on spaceship Earth.

Not from the Denialist Register you weren't.

They used to have them on Mir all the time.

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