NASA Set Its Spaceship on Fire. Here's Why
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- Опубликовано: 27 май 2024
- What did NASA learn from setting their Cygnus spaceships on fire? Is fire more dangerous in space than on Earth? Finding out with Dr. David Urban, Branch Chief from NASA Glenn Research Center.
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00:00 Intro
01:41 Fire in space
03:56 Saffire Experiment
11:55 Conclusions
15:50 Firefighting in space
20:16 Future experiments
26:46 Final thoughts and more interviews
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I really like the interviews with experts. Especially liked how he laughed about asking a scientist if he thinks more research should be done! :))
I know almost exactly where he is in his head on this score as I used to be something of an expert myself in the field of ignition, combustion and safe extinguishment of a large variety of materials in various situations. Now that I am nearly 60 I think that description is so much better than admitting I was a bit of a pyromaniac when I was a teenager. It wasn't just me. I had a load of mates that were into it too. We never set fire to buildings or anything of serious value. We could never have got away with it. I lived in a small place where everyone knew everyone else's kids. I remember running away shouting that "We didn't do the other fire" and the bloke shouting back "Well you're the only kid in the valley with blue hair" (it was the early 80's and we were punks) My uncle was also in the local fire brigade. So burning serious stuff would have brought major bother to the whole family. My proudest moment (maybe not the best term) is sussing out how to set fire to the river. That was a sight. A friend and I have been meaning to do it again with lots of cameras, but we have yet to find somewhere from which we can definitely make a swift getaway, but it's coming soon to youtube. Wow that got a bit long. Nostalgia eh? lol
I am a former submariner - I remember reading long ago that a simple class A fire would raise the pressure in the submarine by a significant amount, raising the problem of harmful gases as the partical pressure increases. Additionally, I would have been very interested in hearing about the procedures for fighting electrical fires (on a sub it starts with dropping electrical power - which can have some adverse consequences if critical systems abruptly lose power). I would really like to hear how the plans to combat these types of fire. Additionally - are spacecraft built to preclude class B and class D fires? If not, how are they countered?
I love that this channel consistently produces great content. There's some channels that I have to watch almost daily and this is definitely one of them.
He found the motherlode of story inspiration and he's just sitting tight on it.
That whole inverse flame thing, I’ve found very interesting for some time now since watching a video of someone creating a methane environment inside a sealed chamber then piping in a tiny stream of O2 and burning it. It blew my mind and I’ve wanted to try it out ever since..
You didn't ask the most important sci-fi question: Can you put out a fire by partially venting the compartment to space while maintaining enough pressure that any depressurization injuries to people are probably survivable?
"there's a button for that"
I mean, if you want to extinguish a fire without the adverse effects of depressurisation, you could flood the place with nitrogen, CO₂, freon, or sulfur hexaflouride.
None of those options would be good for sustaining human life.
Fire can cope better with reduced oxygen than humans can, but for a brief period to extinguish a fire, a human could survive that.
A problem could occur after extinguishing a fire, when you repressurize and reintroduce oxygen.
If there's still enough heat, a fire could reignite.
@@massimookissed1023 this is why I prefer results-based Magic over process-based Science.
He said the flame front moves to the oxygen ,so I don't think that would work.
@@massimookissed1023 The problem is you need whatever was burning to cool down below the ignition temperature, otherwise it will just start back on fire as soon as oxygen is reintroduced.
But the astronauts can just breath out of temporary breathing masks, they don't *have* to breath the ambient atmosphere.
i thought the easiest solution to larger fires in space would be to evacuate the section with the fire, and use the one thing you have in abundance in space vaccum and vent the atmosphere in that section for a short time before represurising.
yes it would waste a small ammount of air and the outgassing would would redirect the spacecraft unless some sort of bi-directional outlet was used to ensure that any thrust from outgassing was automatically counteracted in the oposite direction. an emergency backup supply of replacement air might be the more space efficient than any other fire supression system and it would be always be great to have a larger emergency backup supply of oxigen.
🔥 Great scoop! Nobody covered this news. Well done!
It really is the early days of space exploration. Amazing
Thanks for not "dumbing down" the content. I always enjoy these technical conversations with leading experts.
I’ve worked for an LP company as a service tech for approximately 26 years now and have been dispatched to and been party to many an emergency there in. I find fire both beautiful, awesome, hypnotic, as well as exceedingly humbling and potentially terrifying! It’s both something that’s awe inspiring and obviously utilitarian, as well as something to absolutely be respected and revered. Fire in space is next level and I’m delighted and encouraged to find we are actively investing into this and hopefully producing mitigation tactics, techniques, and technologies gearing up for its eventuality…
Many years ago a guy experimenting with liquid nitrogen stuck a pipe in and pulled it out. He noticed it hummed so he recorded it.
Later while playing the hum near the now warm pipe it began to chill to very low temps -- using sound alone.
Consider this as an alternative to the normal Fire Triangle suppression methods where o e removes the heat from the combustion using a sonic method. A method that untroduces no debris.
Id try that on the ground then in space too. Also it should be easy to store super chilled liquids in space as one need only expose it to shadow in space.
But the sonic chill is most fascinating. Try it.
Super informative and very happy they got to pull the experiments off. Can't wait to see what they can test next. Fire is VERY environment dependent.
I have attended both shipboard firefighting and aircraft firefighting schools while on active duty in the USN. Thank you for this interview. ( thank you for ALL of your interviews!)
If I remember correctly, the Russian space station, Mir, had an unplanned fire experiment 😀
I member that. Must have been in the 90's
Yeah, think that was an Oxygen generator that went out of control. The Russians were living pretty rough back then.
On Feb. 24, 1997, the six crew members aboard the Russian space station Mir faced significant danger when a fire ignited in an oxygen generating system. The searing flame, lasting several minutes, not only cut off access to one of the two Soyuz escape vehicles but also filled the station’s modules with smoke.
That's the kind of next level thinking I love. Thanks for being the communicator of all this information to us simpletons, Fraser. You are one hell of an important human being. Thank you, thank you very much
And
Thank you to all the folks doing the work that is so very important, but so very underrated. The silent heroes of science and engineering. I salute you
What about the Mir fire?
“On Feb. 24, 1997, the six crew members aboard the Russian space station Mir faced significant danger when a fire ignited in an oxygen generating system. The searing flame, lasting several minutes, not only cut off access to one of the two Soyuz escape vehicles but also filled the station’s modules with smoke….”
And the breathing masks didn't work, and one crew member got propelled away from the fire by the fire extinguisher he was trying to use.
Another guy had to hold him by his feet so he could fight the fire.
@@massimookissed1023 That is a failure in the design for a (space, zero gravity) fire extinguisher.
The "tube" should have had a way to secure it around an arm (or the chest) with a lasso/belt [assume the cosmonaut is nude (for ~whatever~ reason), do not depend on existing clothes/surfaces]; so only one hand is needed to direct the "hose" & activate it [while the other hand can hold against a secured object to resist the action/reaction effect].
A great job by Fraser to pull the information out of the scientist about his expertise.
Thank you for being such an advocate for the listeners as some guests are much more ready to share a particular message where in this interview Fraser is doing a lot of the heavy, lifting to keep the information flowing. Fantastic job!
Don’t get me wrong the information was super fascinating, but just not as forthcoming as others .
This was a really interesting topic as I was a fire fighter in the air force
/and, but yes 👍
I've always understood that fire would be different in microgravity since convection doesn't occur in microgravity.
Although I couldn't imagine what fire would look like without convection.
I guess I sort of imagined it as behaving like a fluid. Some sort of luminous sphere of destruction that grows as long as there's an adequate ratio of fuel and oxidizer.
It’s a head-scratcher. Zero-G fire also marinates in its own combustion products. No gravity to push convection or push away the products. You’d think the CO2 would choke a zero-G fire pretty quickly.
I couldn't pass this up, my inner Beavis came out when I saw FIRE FIRE FIRE
A very interesting subject! Thanx Frasier!
All sailors in the US Navy are trained as firefighters. As such, I found this conversation fascinating.
Dear Fraser, the thumbnail is not accurate to the story. You certainly don't need clickbaity thumbnails. I think, most of us love you because you are exact opposite of clickbaits.
As someone who teaches Science to the masses I already had utmost respect for you however to learn you are selfless enough to risk your life to help those around you kicks that up a notch. I am sure I speak for all those around you and those you have helped when I say thank you for the service you have done for your community and the world at large.
Thanks for a very informative article .
What a fascinating point I wish he'd gone into more. We often speak of the huge challenges of creating enough oxygen on Mars to make it habitable but Dr Urban made a very important point. You can't just have pure oxygen, you need 78% nitrogen and there simply is not that much available on Mars. How would they make it? Please can you follow up on that? I have not heard anyone speak about manufacturing nitrogen in-situ.
I'd start by looking at perchlorates, those have to be disposed of for farming and for all I know might be nitrogen compounds.
Great interview. Very interesting. Extremely surprising to hear that gentleman mention that scrubbing out the N2 is challenging. Every O2 concentrator used does precisely that very simply using zeolite beds.
Had to drag a few answers out of Dr. Urban, but it was very interesting. I love watching the videos of fire in low gravity. Nice stuff Fraser.
Great show Fraser, another reason why space travel is extra scary. We were so worried about Aliens & HAL , I hadn't even thought about FIRE & let alone when one of your crewmates goes full Jack Torrance. I'll stick to the terrestrial travel , the Subway's is scary enough. PEACE AND LOVE TO EVERYONE ❤❤.
One of the most interesting videos by FC.
I really enjoyed this interview, thank you! Very interesting research as we usually see fires in space in movies but it another thing to actually do it and see what will happen. The re-ignition part sounded kind of scary, though. Luckily the module wasn't crewed so nothing really bad could happen.
Thank you, Fraser, for not contributing to the misinformation spread by Hollywood, whereupon Oxygen can magically burn itself.
Thank you for bringing up the 'Triangle' wherein the essential elements for fire are listed - Fuel, Oxygen (an oxidising agent) and Heat (an ignition source).
That's a great way to accurately convey the essential make-up of (almost) any fire.
Thank you 😊
Omg! This is what we live for. Ty!
Very interesting.
i dk if dr urban was aware, he probabsbly was, but a clevelander who worked at glenn responded to this video: “I worked on something similar in early 2000s at Glenn, although smaller scale experiment. It was called the Combustion Module 2 and flew onboard (sadly) the last Columbia mission.” 🙁
It is interesting when you think about it... we did it once, accidentally, and people with families burned alive while we sat and watched, because there was nothing else we could do. and we just made sure it never happened again.. but what if it does, under any cause? What can we do?
my recommendation is an auxiliary life support system with pull-out oxygen masks available in regular intervals through the craft. If all other fire suppression procedures fail, an alarm will signal, giving crew 15-30 seconds to grab and don an oxygen mask before the cabin atmosphere gets purged with nitrogen. Fresh atmosphere for the whole craft - crisp, cool nitrogen rushes through and takes all the smoke and oxygen and combustion products and fumes away. once the fires have been extinguished and the heat has reduced to a safe level, that stream of nitrogen intro the cabin will be replaced by a stream of fresh air with mixed in O2, and an auditory and visual signal will indicate that the cabin is being supplied oxygen but is not yet at a safe O2 level. Once the O2 level reaches a safe level (not necessarily ~21% but high enough to sufficiently sustain good lucidity), the cabin atmosphere indicator will display the default symbol you would normally see when the air is breathable. The whole time that purge process happens, the crew will be wearing the oxygen masks and breathing off the auxiliary life support system. The system itself would introduce no residue to clean up, so the only cleanup would be that mess the fire itself left.
What about all the surplus wiring in the boeing starliner is it a problem ?.
Being aware that the Russian Space Station Mir suffered a fire whilst a crew was onboard I would like to know whether the Russians shared any of their data from that and if so what lessons, if any, NASA learned as a consequence?
20 years on US Subs .. We do not fear leaks or flooding to the degree we do Fire .. Fire in a few minutes can produce an in-breathable environment throughout a submarine .. Its a contained environment, what ever you use to extinguish the fire you have to live live it .. The only good thing is you can surface and ventilate to atmosphere or escape ..
Have you ever read _Das Boot_ ?
They got stuck on the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar after depth charge damage, and sea water in their lead-acid batteries was producing chlorine gas.
And they couldn't surface until they fixed the batteries and a few other repairs.
The captain had high praise for his chief engineer.
I would have liked if they go more into the human aspect of surviving a fire in a space vehicle. For example, it is required to have a type of firefighter mask and small oxygen tank for every single person onboard. After the fire is out how does the air get circulated out and replaced. Stuff like that would have interested me :)
This episode really... ignited ny interest 😂🎉
i like a recycle method, since the filters would be intaking everything a good idea would be to detect and filter out the carbon to be used for fire extinguish. the heavier the fire the more repellent you have
Fire is cool!
I had supposed that nitrogen would be more dangerous than CO2 because it would not warn people breathing higher concentrations of it that their oxygen is being replaced, the way CO2 does.
Too late for the Apollo astronauts, but kudos for looking now! Why so long a delay? What else is being overlooked?
I wonder if they considered using small thrust (e.g. RCS thrusters) to see how it affects the spreading or extinguishing process.
Very interesting. Did Nasa suddenly realize XY is an issue and Orion capsule gets rewired?
Probably a good thing to study after all these years
Always think of Laurence fishburne an event horizon talks about how it move like waves
Interesting
And now I'm curious how well it would work to circulate a fire's own gasses back towards it, maybe with a catalyst involved to work through some or all of the carbon monoxide in the process.
I think submarines knows some about fires in closed space . Gravity fire vs gravity free fire , interesting and scary .
One of my first jobs (decades ago) was working in a computer room full of mainframe computers the fire suppression system used halon gas to displace all the oxygen so if you didn’t get your ass the hell out of there immediately in the event of a fire you’d be toast, but hey the equipment would be fine :-)
Where do you place the smoke/CO detectors?
I suppose not on “ceiling” like on earth, but you have to consider the fire in space goes against the airflow…
Sapphire Fire, nice to meet you!
ruclips.net/video/cmY5LjuN_Ek/видео.html
Many otherwise innocent things will become accidental rockets in microgravity. Any partially flammable object will have asymmetric thrust if it catches on fire. A burning pencil stub will spiral eraser first through the cabin air. The motion will carry the burning part into fresh oxygen.
From a mathematical modelling perspective, the simplest unintentional rocket would be a sphere that is half metal half plastic. With symmetric flame it would travel in a straight line.
Here is a scary visual for a science fiction movie. Early on establish that the crew glues magnets to small objects, so they can store them for easy access by sticking them to a steel box. An electrical fault causes leads to a fire in the box. The box gets hot enough to ignite the attached things, then it reaches the curie temperature for the magnets and the magnets all release. Suddenly there are a bunch of burning things flying through the cabin. The faster something burns the more thrust it has. So that feeds more oxygen to the fire.
Question: Have we ever considered that Mars or Venus may have been Thea?
Question: Assuming there is a stable black hole within a reachable distance from Earth, which kinds of experiments would you want to do? Which single experiment do you think would teach us the most?
Love the question shows. Do you think the Parker solar probe could be re-directed to impact an asteroid?
So I guess having a nice homey touch like a log burning fireplace isn't going to be a thing on a space station in the near future. ☺
Experiments show 16% O2 is the minimum that allows self-sustaining combustion and minimum %19 - %19.5 - below this hypoxia is a problem on earth. But increasing the pressure allows use of less oxygen. I'm guessing people can acclimate to lower % oxygen because less stress without gravity.
I would have thought that fire in zero G would just go out as it consumed all the oxidizer within range and as there is no "hot gas go up because gravity" there can be no new adjacent oxidizer to perpetuate the reaction. So the real danger is the forced air flow feeding the fire and doing what gravity does.
Technically there has been a couple of full scale pad fire tests on spacecraft - Apollo 1 being one example. The results were “bad”.
One option in space that is not available on Earth would be to remove that oxygen by venting the entire compartment. That would however require the crew to have another compartment to retreat to or pressure suits.
Nitrogen as an extinguishing agent assumes a mixed gas atmosphere.
On the inverse flame scenario, I have worked on systems that burn air in a natural gas atmosphere for metal sintering purposes. The transition from preheat on a normal flame to inverse flame operations is “interesting”.
Too soon, lol. I recommend everyone check out the Gus Grissom memorial. It's pretty cool. His wife refused to give the airforce his cap back, then ended up donating it to the memorial exhibit.
Everything has frequency even fire, so why don't we do more research in using frequency to stop fires.
On a moon or exoplanet with a high concentration of flammable gasses, how can we explore without turning it into a new star
Sometimes you want.... Apollo 1, all the conditions to fire up, impossible to do better.
i wonder if sound waves could help to controll fire in zero g
I can see the future of biological computing and network communication being a future of spacecraft.
No fire engines in space.
Titan is missing a key ingredient though, all that methane is pretty harmeless without O2
Did you check that hatch for heat?
Very interesting but it makes me wonder why it wasnt considered before. Could we have prevented the death of Gus Grissom and his fellow crew men in their capsule fire. Was it something stupid, an error of omission.... and that was under EARTH gravity not space... I am just puzzled. If I remember correctly the big decision afterwards was not to use pure oxygen environments.... but why in 50 years low g or 0 g was this topic not addressed? Or was it? I was just a kid at that time. One of my questions is about the time line of research. When was it started seriously? Too many unanswered questions. The Cygnus experiments are a novel way to get insitu observations. Good discussion as far as it went. Keep up the good work.
Hey Fraser, have you had a chance to check out the study for the university of Ottawa stating no dark matter? If so how do you feel about it? Thanks for your videos!! Keep em coming!!
After a brief review of the abstract it seems like an attempt to explain away some of the “dark matter” observations while ignoring others. Particularly gravitational lensing variations.
More Space Debris??
Fraser, why was this interview only half an hour long instead of your usual full hour interviews?
He had a time constraint so I had to adapt.
@@frasercain Thank you.
Well you certainly managed to pack in a lot in that half hour. It’ll be interesting to see him back in the future once they’ve done some low gravity experiments. It’s reassuring that this type of research is going on as more people will be working in these environments in the not too distant future.
didn't they have fires on MIR station?
well you could starve the oxygen if the the habitants had breathing air tanks i presume
Everything I know about dealing with fires on the Moon I read in Artemis by Andy Weir. Vent the oxygen and cool the burn with an inert gas.
Yes, fire needs oxygen to burn. The fire triangle is a diagram that shows that three elements are necessary for fire to occur:
Let's ask the sun
The Sun is a nuclear fusion reaction. No oxygen necessary.
@@frasercain thank you frasercain helium right?
to put a fire out in space You could use a vacuum cylinder and suck the fire out, or a tube to space !.
Would it not b simpler, if there were a fire in space, for the astronauts to immediately suit up and evacuate the compartment where the fire is ?
Suiting up takes a long time. Like, an hour.
Huh, the lack of nitrogen on mars thing is interesting. You can have oxygen but no nitrogen that would make everything inside your mars base extremely flammable, lol.
Oxygen is not flammable. Finish those high school classes...
most interesting puzzel .
So... setting things on fire in space... how do you get this job?
Hmm you could starve it. Considering that there are ample oxygen systems, that are easily put in, that could then allow the oxygen to be purged from the environment. Maybe rebreathers as part of a carryable emergency kit.
Pure water doesn’t conduct. If able to manage before it collects impurities then should be safe.
Must be air😉😇no air no fire
I thought fire needed oxygen and I thought there is an oxygen in space in the vacuum of it so how could there be fire with no oxygen
As if the multiple fires on Mir didn't give them enough data...
ERROR: missing question. "What are you currently obsessed with? " not found! 🤔😉
Quoting Beavis or Butthead: "Fire. Heh. Fire."
reminds me of that one scene in avatar
ruclips.net/video/SFT6m50Psw0/видео.html
-Fire, Wang Fire. This is my wife, Safire.
-Safire Fire, nice to meet you.
Are they studying fission on the ISS? Only makes sense right.
I was just thinking that for an arsonist, a firebug, a job in the space industry must be a special kind of fulfillment. 🤪😄
Took me a month to think of this joke.
Proof NASA's budget is so big, it can afford to just burn it up.
Titan.
In other words if youpickung up sone fuel from the surface, do it robotically with no oxygen present. Humans not recommended.
Less guest episodes, more Fraser alone ones please please pleaaaaaase ! We dont wanna see long conversations with a lot of work, instead, Fraser telling those things in summary is much better
Just skip them. You can tell the spacebites episodes because they've got my picture on them. This is how I learn the information that I report on. I could do it privately, but I know people enjoy watching the process of journalism.
Thanks for the reply. I said that because as you know, we, I mean the fans follow more than several channels, some of us like even follow of channels. So, I realized all channels started to share not only videos but also stories! That makes our notification section full almost every day. Anyways, you know better @@frasercain
Surely the illustration is stupid as it shows impossible physics. The oxygen level in space is too low for any flames. All burning would be internal to a spacecraft if there is the correct amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Otherwise I imagine overheated oxygen generating substances might smoulder.
👀😂😂😂🤦🏽♂️😅 sure