Comment by ceejayoz
2 days ago
SpaceX lost a Falcon 9 to one of these things rupturing. A car accident with these onboard sounds… unfun.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/13/nasa-releases-summary-...
2 days ago
SpaceX lost a Falcon 9 to one of these things rupturing. A car accident with these onboard sounds… unfun.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/13/nasa-releases-summary-...
So the GP describes compressed air, while Falcon 9 rockets use cryogenic helium, oxygen, and RP1 kerosene.
So I got no idea how you can even compare these two completely different systems and go from a launch failure to an explosive car accident?
They've had several COPV failures.
Including boring old nitrogen blowing up a Starship: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
> "Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing," the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19).
If you SCUBA, your tanks need regular checks (https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/inspecting-and-testing-s...), because pressurized air can indeed kill (https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/diver-killed-in-s...) if the tank fails. The gas for these thrusters will happily accelerate you with the same force they're using to make a car fly given the chance.
At these pressures, it doesn't matter to the human body what is in the tank if it is at all compressible. If the tank fails, its gonna go badly.
Just for reference this is 50% more pressure than the pressure that crushed that submarine at the titanic.
If a tank of 10k PSI compressed air ruptures, you're going to know it.
Not if you're close enough!
That tank is pressurized to over 700 bar, if a pressure vessel ruptures under that amount of pressure, it doesn’t matter what gas is inside of it, it’s not going to be pretty.