[AR] N2O contamination (was Re: Hypothetical Lox cooling)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2020 21:41:45 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 20 Oct 2020, ken mason wrote:
I wonder if any of these horror stories had any role in the fatal Scaled
nitrous blast of July 2007 which largely remains unsolved?
Although details have never been made public, it seems very likely that
the explosion started when nitrous contaminated with organics decomposed
(which, as Doug hinted, it does *much* more readily than pure nitrous) and
overpressurized part of their test setup. The rest of it plausibly was
mostly a tank-burst BLEVE -- actual detonation of a tankful of N2O should
have been much more destructive.
There is ample evidence that Scaled had gotten too casual about nitrous,
so they probably weren't being cautious enough about materials and
cleaning. XCOR had some alarming minor incidents with nitrous earlier,
which stopped when they instituted LOX-class cleaning for all nitrous
plumbing.
Henry
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