Posted on 07/28/2007 10:29:41 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Day-to-day operations resumed at Mojave Air and Space Port on Friday as state officials arrived to begin their investigation of the explosion that killed three Scaled Composites employees and seriously injured three others. Eric Blackwell, 38, of Randsburg; Charles May, 45, of Mojave; and Todd Ivens, 33, of Tehachapi were killed Thursday during what was described as routine cold-testing of a nitrous oxide propellent system for the company's latest spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo.
The names of those hospitalized were not released.
"We are doing our best to take care of the families of the deceased as well as the injured and their families, and we hope you will join us in keeping them in your thoughts and prayers," read a statement posted on the Scaled Composites Web site Friday afternoon.
The blast is under investigation as an industrial accident by the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or CalOSHA, whose investigators closed off the accident site, said Tom Weil, director of business operations for the airport.
The explosion occurred at about 2:45 p.m. Thursday at a remote testing site at the northeastern edge of the airport, in an area reserved for testing rocket engines.
The workers "were pressure-testing the flow of nitrous oxide in a tank. For an unknown reason the tank exploded," a Kern County coroner's statement said.
Scaled Composites is developing SpaceShipTwo, the larger descendent of the successful Burt Rutan-designed SpaceShipOne which captured the $10 million Ansari X Prize three years ago as the world's first privately funded manned space program.
SpaceShipTwo is under development for Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by Virgin Group CEO Sir Richard Branson in order to carry paying customers into suborbital space.
Thursday's testing involved components of the SpaceShipTwo rocket engine, and was not intended as an engine firing, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at avpress.com ...
Keep in touch with this story. So far there is no mention of how it might affect the pace of development of space tourism, although that is the sole question.
This is a tragic reminder of the dangers of spaceflight.
Be it NASA or private industry.
This was an industrial accident and had very little to do with "spaceflight". The nitrous oxide is used as the oxidizer for the synthetic rubber fuel for SpaceShipTwo and is carried in a spherical tank. Nitrous Oxide is stored as a liquid at about 750 psi at ambient temperature.
It is stored this way whether being used to charge cans of whipped cream, as "laughing gas" for anesthesia, in drag racing (other major uses of NO2) or as an oxidizer for a rocket ship. It looks like the tank ruptured. There may not have been an "explosion", only a pressure vessel rupturing with reslting catastrophic consequences. Think of a SCUBA air tank rupture, but with less pressure.
From Wikipedia:
Nitrous oxide can also be used in a monopropellant rocket. In the presence of a heated catalyst, N2O will decompose exothermically into nitrogen and oxygen, at a temperature of approximately 1300 °C.
They were doing a "cold test", and I saw statements that it had been done many times and was supposed to be safe. It does seem to be a bit of a mystery, from the bare outline of the facts involved.
Some subcontractor who made the tank (pressure-vessel) is probably sweating bullets. Almost certainly the tank was properly engineered and designed.
Most likely there was either an error or flaw in fabrication - a bad weldment for example which ND inspection didn't catch - or a flaw in the material from which the tank was fabricated, which was likewise not caught by incoming inspection.
Didn't NASA have a tank that was dropped, but they used it any way?????
FWIW, one of RCH's rants on Coast the other month was on the shuttle's internal cryotanks. Apparently, they're way passed the spec'd life, and the manufacturer is either gone or no longer makes them.
So perhaps it was inexperience in the fabrication, or maybe the metal used came from China.
space ping
FWIW, one of RCH's rants on Coast the other month was on the shuttle's internal cryotanks. Apparently, they're way passed the spec'd life, and the manufacturer is either gone or no longer makes them.
Yeah, well, RCH also thinks the big problem with the shuttle is that "physics has changed" since the shuttle was designed.
[rolls eyes]
No, it was not astronauts that died.
But it was people working to put them up there.
A big part of that is “industrial” kind of work sure.
No less necessary then anything else involved.
What's the heated catalyst?
I presume the heated catalyst is some type of metal filament. In fact I find “heated catalytic wire” via Google.
The indication of a “cold test” is that no such element was present.
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