Wildfire at Vandenberg Air Force Base Threatens ULA, SpaceX Launches (latimes.com) 55
Longtime Slashdot reader Bruce Perens writes: A fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast -- currently over 10,000 acres in size -- has approached the pads used by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. No structures have been damaged, but power lines have been destroyed. There is about 1000 feet of firebreak around each pad, but the presence of smoke and the absence of electrical power is potentially a problem for rockets, payloads, and ground-support equipment. The WorldView 4 satellite, a Delta 4 rocket, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with at least 7 (potentially 11) Iridium satellites are known to be on site. Ground support equipment at the base constitutes the United States' only access to polar orbit for large rockets without overflying populated areas. Liquid oxygen stored on the site may already have been released as a precaution or boiled off, and there are large supplies of rocket fuel, but these have so far not been a hazard. The Soberanes fire near Big Sur, located 180 miles farther South on the California coast, has gone on for two months, burning 185 square miles and costing over $200 million dollars to fight with no end in sight. Obviously, it's dry out there. The fire forced officials to cancel the Atlas V rocket launch on Sunday, and the next attempt won't occur for a week.
SpaceX cops it in the neck again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Man SpaceX just can't catch a break. Two nasty explosions (One on the damn pad) and now serious danger of fire damage to launch facilities, although I assume the pad itself is probably pretty safe ( I mean what can a bush fire do that a rocket engine exploding to pieces cant , right? )
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Meh, so long as the facility is back to normal before their return to flight, this might even be good for them. As it stands it's only delaying ULA, increasing the already heavy global backlog on launches and making it harder for customers to bail (It's been a boom period for demand in launches, and providers were already struggling to keep up). The Russians are also [space.com] suffering delays.
Oh dear, poor SpaceX. (Score:1)
I mean never mind all the property that has been destroyed, the huge amount of forest destroyed and wildlife killed and peoples lives put in danger. No, lets pity a space company run by a billionaire that is adding to the problem of climate change launching rockets using huge amounts of fuel (even if its just H2+O2 that still requires vast amounts of energy to create) carrying yet more soon-to-be space junk into orbit.
Re:Oh dear, poor SpaceX. (Score:5, Insightful)
C"mon, we're talking 10000 acres here. 4000 hectares for those who can't be bothered to learn more than one way to measure things. The USA, currently, has something like 750 million acres of forest (300M hectares). So this 10K acres amounts to 0.00133% of the US forest land. Assuming the entire 10K acres is/was forest.
Oh, and Falcon doesn't use H2-O2. It uses Kerosene & LOX. And if there were 1000 Falcon launches annually, the pollutants released would still be rather lower than NYC's annual commuter traffic.
Yes, I know it's fashionable to hate on Musk. But he's not destroying the world, he's not taking food from the mouths of babies, he's not making things worse for anyone (except possibly ULA and the Russians)...
IOW, chill.
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Err, its *currently* 10K acres burning. There are 180+ square miles already burnt. And so what if even that is a small percentage, its not small if you live near there or have been affected.
FWIW I'm not hating on Musk, I just think people should get their priorities of things to be concerned about in order.
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FWIW I'm not hating on Musk, I just think people should get their priorities of things to be concerned about in order.
Many fires have happened in the past, and many more are likely to happen in the future.
Overall it doesn't really have a major impact on the world.
But what SpaceX are attempting to do has the potential (at very least) to bring about significant changes to the history of space travel.
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"But what SpaceX are attempting to do has the potential (at very least) to bring about significant changes to the history of space travel."
I seriously doubt that. Lauching might become cheaper but thats all. Until a completely new type of space drive system is invented that doesn't rely on chucking mass backwards to move forwards humans won't be going much further than the moon again anytime soon. Even trips to mars are a pipe dream due to it being a one way trip.
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I seriously doubt that. Lauching might become cheaper but thats all.
And that's basically everything that has ever happened that took something from esoteric parlour trick to technology we can't live without.
E.g. it wasn't Gutenberg that ushered in the era of the printed word, it was the steam printing press. That enabled a whole new medium where words could be printed cheaply enough to be thrown away after just one reading. Whole new ball game.
Space launch is pretty much the same. What's holding us back today is cost. With lower cost many interesting things will happen. Whe
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"But what SpaceX are attempting to do has the potential (at very least) to bring about significant changes to the history of space travel."
I seriously doubt that. Lauching might become cheaper but thats all. Until a completely new type of space drive system is invented that doesn't rely on chucking mass backwards to move forwards humans won't be going much further than the moon again anytime soon. Even trips to mars are a pipe dream due to it being a one way trip.
All Henry Ford did was make automobiles cheaper. Clearly that had no real impact on the history of cars.
Once you get costs cheap enough, all sorts of unrealistic things become possible.
Why don't families go to an orbital space station for a holiday? noon could afford it
Are there manufacturing processes that work better in micro-gravity? Yep, but none are currently cost effective.
Why don't we mine asteroids instead of strip-mining earth? it is cheaper to mine on Earth.
etc.
If you make it cheap enough, spa
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"might become cheaper but thats all"
When capitalism works, it works very well.
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>It uses Kerosene & LOX
Salmon propels rockets? I never knew.
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Actually, salmon wouldn't be a bad choice for a fish-based rocket. It's a fatty fish, and fats burn well in hybrid rockets.
You of course couldn't have a kerosene and salmon rocket, since you need to burn the fish with an oxidizer. But you could have a lox-LOX rocket ;)
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Actually, salmon wouldn't be a bad choice for a fish-based rocket. It's a fatty fish, and fats burn well in hybrid rockets.
You of course couldn't have a kerosene and salmon rocket, since you need to burn the fish with an oxidizer. But you could have a lox-LOX rocket ;)
With a Toro-LOX boost stage for heavy loads.
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C"mon, we're talking 10000 acres here. 4000 hectares for those who can't be bothered to learn more than one way to measure things. The USA, currently, has something like 750 million acres of forest (300M hectares). So this 10K acres amounts to 0.00133% of the US forest land. Assuming the entire 10K acres is/was forest.
Not to mention that wildfires are a natural occurrence, and part of the forest life cycle. If they didn't threaten human stuff, the best thing to do would be to let them (the naturally caused ones, anyway) burn themselves out.
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Good point. There are lifeforms that have evolved to take advantage of forest fires. And which were pushed close to extinction (in the USA) when our policy was "Forest fire?? Put it out, right now!".
The new Forest Service policy (new to me - some of you are probably young enough that it's been policy all your lives) is to let them burn unless they endanger humans or hum
Re:Oh dear, poor SpaceX. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Falcon 9 is entirely LOX / RP-1, not LOX / LH
2) Who do you think owns SpaceX's competitors, starving orphans?
3) You're sitting here writing this enjoying the fruits of the orbital launch market (communications, gps, monitoring satellites, etc) while damning it. That last satellite that SpaceX lost? Most of its communications channels were allocated to providing remote areas of Africa internet service, trying to uplift a continent. But... damn them!
4) The amount of CO2 released by a Falcon 9 launch is roughly the equivalent of one transpacific flight of a 747. Which do you think does more good, a single transpacific flight or a typical satellite? Or in some cases, many satellites - the Iridium cluster for example is launched half a dozen or more at a time. They launch 6-9 per year. Think 6-9 transpacific 747 flights per year is even remotely in the ballpark of relevance in terms of global CO2 emissions?
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Forests need to burn, it's part of their ecology. The problem is that people keep them from burning to protect property, and then when they finally do burn it's a big conflagration with lots of fuel.
Falcon 9 second stages have all successfully de-orbited and modern satellites are required to deorbit at the end of their life or in the case of geosynchronous, enter a higher storage orbit where they aren't a hazard.to anything in an operational orbit.
Planets die of natural causes eventually. Suns too. If any o
Laughable (Score:1)
Seriously? We are supposed to be afraid of a little brush fire, when the damn thing has to be built to withstand the fires of hell every time a missile is launched?
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If the brush fire has plans to limit itself to existing within the combustion chambers and expansion nozzles then that's an excellent point!
Bad news (Score:2)
And, with the drought, they don't have any water to put it out. (Yes, I know Vandenberg is ocean-adjacent. I was making a joke.)
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Yes, last time I was there, Big Sur was north of Vandenberg. Maybe these places are so obscure on the Central California Coast that people just don't realize where they are really located.
fireproof launch pad? (Score:3)
I realize there are other reasons, but I initially found it funny that fire getting near a launch pad was threatening it. I was thinking, "Don't these things get bathed in fire, every time they're used? Shouldn't they have that whole 'flame retardant' thing figured out by now?"
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The launch pad is not just a hunk of concrete.
There is major infrastructure there for fuelling, climate control of payloads, supplying LOX, data collection from the rocket and payload, umbilicals for all kinds of things like power delivery to the rocket before it's on internal power, high speed cameras, towers for lightning protection, and LOTS more.
That's not even considering rockets, of which there are several on sight. Even "merely" loss of power can cause loss of the payloads if backup generators fail.
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If you watch a launch, you'll notice that the pad is deluged with water during the launch to protect it. Without that, it wouldn't survive. Most of the pad is not fireproof, especially the big tanks full of liquid oxygen and rocket fuel, the control buildings, and in general all of the ground support equipment and anything else that isn't a big hunk of concrete right under where the rocket goes. And even concrete can only stand so much fire before it degrades.
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... host notably because concrete is by definition a hydrated cement aggregate. Heating hardened cement = driving out the water = turning it back into its raw form. More to the point, portland cement is made from limestone by heating in the first place. And not only are you reducing the set cement back to dry cement, but by driving out the water you're creating steam pressure, aka making it vulnerable to spall. Have a fire on it long enough and you soften the rebar as well.
The deluge system is important
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I heard the water is used in sound suppression - I didn't know it also played an important part in heat protection.
Future headline: (Score:1)
Wildfire Arrested For Violating SpaceX Restraining Order
This is why you don't date wildfires.
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Yes it is, as stated in a previous comment.
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It was a map produced by Australia...
Update (Score:2)
Big Sur is North, not South, Oops! Sorry.
The fire is now at 12,000 acres, 45% contained.
Fire is part of the forest ecosystem, to the point that many trees are evolved to need fire to open their seed cones, and other trees are evolved to sprout back from underground after a fire, and fire is needed to open the canopy to new growth and remove debris from the forest floor. Man disrupts the fire cycle by preventing fires to protect property. Thus, when it does burn, you get a big conflagration due to all of th
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No need to apologize. You increased the posting rate by 50%.
Re: Update (Score:2)
How Many Slashdot User Does it Take ... (Score:2)
Too many visitors don't reads the previous comments, where it has already been pointed out several times that Big Sur is indeed North of Vandenberg. Many more will continue to point this out. Maybe I should keep count. Or maybe there can be a way to score them all redundant.
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