Accidental launch of a rocket during an engine test Tianlong-3
[https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-static-fire-test-results-in-unintended-launch-and-huge-explosion/](https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-static-fire-test-results-in-unintended-launch-and-huge-explosion/)
> Flox-70 - optimal oxidizer for regular RP-1, gives it near-hydrolox performance. What is it, you ask? 30% liquid oxygen, 70% liquid fluorine.
I actually nearly had a stroke reading that.
When liquid oxygen is a stabilizing agent, you seriously need to reconsider the chemistry you're performing.
You and my grandfather would have gotten along. As a boy he was known for sneaking up on bulls and poking them with a sharpened stick - for fun! He became the town doctor but his nickname, "Shank", lasted his lifetime.
Probably [Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane](Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitanehttps://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane), though I'm sure there's other Things I won't Work With that probably qualify
Same. I have a great book, [Space Propulsion Analysis and Design](https://shop.spacetechnologyseries.com/ebooks/space-propulsion-analysis-and-design.html), that goes into stuff like that. My favorite exotic chemical propellant is metastable-Helium/Ammonia. Apparently, some European guys actually synthesized some, but apparently it's not very stable when it gets above 50k, although the specific impulse is supposed to be well over 1000 seconds.
lol, the one ton spill of chlorine trifluoride holy shit who though shipping a literal ton of that stuff was a good idea. "the concrete was on fire" what a quote.
>Beryllium hydride - investigated by Energomash in the 1960s, as part of the RD-550 motor. Storeable, designed to use alongside hydrogen peroxide oxidizer, produces vacuum Isp in the 400 sec range, which is very nice for a storeable motor.
So is this more or less effective at spreading cancer than those nuclear powered cruise missiles from SLAM/Project Pluto?
Beryllium is mostly only toxic in long-term exposure, and creates an autoimmune disease in the lungs. That sucks, but it requires breathing in beryllium dust for a long time, so it really only happens to people who work in aerospace (and a few no-longer-relevant, or super obscure niche professions).
Whereas spewing radioactive material across a few countries is very obviously and directly a fucking stupid idea.
ah yes, NSWR, chernobyl continuously for weeks at a time.
Sea Dragon, where its engines are NSWRs, and it has multi-stage AJ260s using atomic sparkler solid boosters. for modest-sized rideshare missions into orbit around an Alderson disk
"atomic sparkler solid booster" Maybe its just because I'm tired, but I don't find anything about Sea Dragon having atomic engines. I'd like to read more about that if you have a source.
What do you mean "terrible idea"? It sounds fun. From https://www.quora.com/What-is-liquid-fluorine-Could-it-be-used-to-make-rocket-fuel :
> In terms of energy and reactivity liquid fluorine would be an EXCELLENT rocket oxidizer. However it is so aggressively reactive that most folks would prefer to use something “tamer”. About sixty years ago I got my first professional job - right out of college. The employer was called “Rocketdyne”. They had a little, crude laboratory on a hilltop just northwest of Canoga park. I was introduced to liquid fluorine by a professional worker who had a small fused quartz container with about a pint of liquid (cryogenic) fluorine in it. In his demonstration he squirted a stream of the liquid at the ground - it almost explosively reacted and burned a “gopher-hole” instantly wherever it hit. Next he directed a stream of the LF2 at a small tree branch - It instantly burned through the branch which then fell onto the ground. Everything that the LF2 touched was instantly obliterated with a large display of smoke and fire. Later the laboratory actually did build a small rocket motor and tankage to use LF2 as the oxidizer. The pure nickel propellant tanks and lines were carefully cleaned and dried and then “passivated” by passing dry nitrogen through them with gradually increasing amounts of fluorine. The motor was left overnight and the next morning the test was scheduled. The tanks were loaded - the appropriate alarms were sounded - we observers were secured in a blockhouse to view the test (through three inch thick windows). When the propellant valves were opened the first flow of liquid fluorine arrived at the test engine - it encountered some dew that had accumulated in the engine overnight. The dew instantly ignited which ignited the engine hardware that ignited the test stand etc. etc. We dogged down the doors, turned on a flow of compressed air to keep the flow going outward and sat it out. After the smoke cleared we all breathed a sigh of relief and walked back to the “office building”.
I am sure that liquid lithium is just as fun. Reactive and corrosive.
Yes, I too am scared that we will never see those awesome molten Lithium, elemental fluorine, and hydrogen rockets again. It is a totally normal thing to be scared about.
Safety of the propellants for rockets is like barely even on the list.
And the substances that are used... Kinda have to be on the ultra-spicy spectrum.
Aka most rockets rely on the hypergolic reaction between oxidizer and fuel to start and keep going(aka self-ignition when mixed) with some very specific parameters: thrust, energy density, weight, ignition delay, temperature ranges etc.
I recommend "Ignition" by Clarke. Pretty interesting read on the topic.
>the worst possible rocket propellant or something?
...so there was this study called [project orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion\))
I highly recommend reading Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (freely available on the internet) as a great story of why rocket fuel is always fun stuff.
It has pro and con, the problem for someone like China who boast all the time how awesome they are at construction magaprojects from HSR to skyscappers somehow construct new launch site near the sea took them years and they just keep using those toxic propellant rockets with cold war era launch sites that will have a lot of villages on crossfire for shit and giggles cuz [But we warns them to evac! We clear!].
It just they didn't care, it seems.
The list of chemicals that are combustible and somewhat stable enough to be in a rocket is surprisingly long, but unsurprisingly, a lot of those things don't like things that are alive.
It came in close second to ClF3, which is much harder to store but doesn’t really do anything worse than set everything inextinguishably on fire.
This stuff will burn sand, concrete, water, asbestos, and the CO2 in a regular fire extinguisher; and is actually hypergolic with all of them. It is condensed chemical spite.
The things that are useful for a rocket fuel (a very large amount of stored chemical energy and the ability to react extremely fast with the other component involved in the mix) do happen to tend to also be very bad for most of what makes biology work.
Well it's nice for shit like satellites and things that aren't running their engines in atmosphere because it ignites on contact with oxidizer, which I believe helps to reduce engine complexity. Additionally, unlike cryogenic propellants (Liquid Hydrogen, Oxygen, Methane, etc), It won't boil off in space so for the moment it's basically a necessity for long duration deep-space missions.
Hypergolic propellants are a super annoying part of rocketry. Their special property is the fact that they automatically ignite on contact with each other.
This makes them unbelievably desirable, particularly for rockets which need to be kept on standby for a long time, because they tend to be stable at room temperature, you don't need any crazy complex ignition systems in your engine, and they're nearly as reliable as you can get without using solid propellant or monopropellant, while offering far better performance. You will often see hyperbolics used for orbital manoeuvring thrusters, like the space shuttles OMS, the Apollo lunar lander engines etc. When you need it to work, but you need more performance than a basic hydrogen peroxide or cold gas thruster, you use hypergolics.
The kicker is that almost every hypergolic that has those traits is also absurdly carcinogenic, toxic, and downright shitty to deal with.
UDMH (Unsymmetrical\_dimethylhydrazine), often just called hydrazine (although that can refer to a broader class of hypergolic propellants) is the standard go-to and is just absolute cancer/nerve agent/skin melty juice as the comment above pointed out. That's mostly ok when it's only used in deep space, or in ICBMS (at that point you've got bigger issues than a slow death from UDMH), but when your primary launch vehicle like the Chinese Long March family use hydrazine propellants in the first stage, and when those first stages are **INTENDED** to land back on land near isolated mountain villages, that's an issue. Particularly as there's always residual UDMH and oxidizer (either nitric acid in the early days, or Dinitrogen Tetroxide these days) still in the booster tanks which, if it doesn't directly reach people can still leach into ground water.
There is one technically-hypergolic, storable propellant combination that is relatively safe and was actually flown, kerosene with high-concentration hydrogen peroxide. Both will happily sit around at STP (as long as you don't contaminate the peroxide with transition metal salts), and while not hypergolic from just pouring them together, the several hundred degrees hot steam and oxygen mixture you get from decomposing the peroxide is hypergolic with kerosene.
people have tried all sorts of things. For instance there was research into using [chlorine triflouride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride) as the oxidizing component in rocket fuel, this is a substance so reactive that it can spontaneously ignite *concrete*. One notable professor quipped that the best safety measure when dealing with it is a good pair of running shoes.
Find a copy of John D. Clark’s book, “Ignition!” for the hilarious, terrifying history of how these evil compounds were developed.
Consider that UDMH and Nitrogen Tetroxide were in no way the most dangerous chemicals that were researched after WWII.
Yikes.
Fun fact: the stuff is pretty toxc even in quantities small enough that it is barely visible or not visible at all. So you need to not just stay out of the cloud, but need to stay far away from the cloud. The "run far, run fast" bit is disturbingly accurate.
Wikipedia says Tiangong-3 runs LOX/RP-1, not the red funk. You still don't want to launch a rocket that close to a city even if it's powered by unicorn farts.
Chemists keep pointing at physicist for creating nuclear horrors.
Physicist would point to chemicals that have no half life and cause ten times the horror at tenth the cost.
In the background, a biologist is heard laughing manically.
US ICBMs used to run on the same fuels. It's what caused the [Damascus missile site explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion), which scattered the remaining bits of closed nuclear silo about 2km away.
TNO as an oxidiser, and "Aerozine 50" as a fuel, which is 50% hydrazine and 50% UDMH. A mix so amazing that the missile crew had safety suits they could wear for about an hour, before either of those would eat right through it. This is what someone handling Aerozine 50 would wear: [RFHCO suit (af.mil)](https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Upcoming/Photos/igphoto/2001836486/) And it that lasted an hour.
> including human blood (it reacts with the iron in it).
There's no free iron in human blood. It's deep inside hemoglobin, and there's a shit load of organic protein to oxidize through before you get to it. WTF is even this crap? Oxidizers fuck up biomolecules and it's go fuck-all to do with whether metalloproteins are present or not.
Somehow this rocket looks very familiar. The rocket is built by a private company. It uses Kerolox fuel, has 9 open cycle engines in the first stage and a vacuum version in the second stage. The first stage can also land and is reusable. I can't put my finger on it, but I think I've seen this somewhere else before. But I'm sure the Chinese would never copy someone else's idea. /s
Hilarious that they have a whole branch of their military called a "Rocket Force" and they still get massive fuckups like this.
Also hilarious that despite having a "rocket force", they're this far behind the US.
Actually it happened to an American rocket once… 72 years ago. Except that one was launched in the middle of nowhere instead of on the outskirts of a city with 800k people.
"Explain to me how this bomb will not land in Israel and then, literally, bounce right back and blow up Wadiya"
\>rocket with round nose blows up in country of launch
Aladeen was right
Between this and the top post about keyholing rifles, I’m completely convinced that the J-20 is a formidable competitor to the F-35.
(Definitely the US doesn’t know of a fatal weakness and is being silent about it like the T-72 turret.)
boeing heard "there is competition from china!" and decided to beat them at their highest stat, failure rate.
P.S. I pay the extra for the Airbus flight every time I can!
Publicly, the stealth only fully works from the front aspect because j-20s are designed very specifically to hamper US expeditionary capability by being disposable air tanker killers of desperation.
The keyholing post was a photoshop of a picture a guy took of some of his targets he laid out and a stock photo of a Chinese soldier.
You can also tell by the fact that the targets and the bullet holes are gigantic compared to the guy.
We like to clown on the PLA for their lack of combat experience but from what we've gathered the Chinese do the basics pretty well all things considered.
It's good you mentioned this, it's also important that the comments under that post did include a video from the PLA where they were running around a training course and thye were key holing targets.
That being said I was quite worried when I say the soldier in front of the targets cause at that scale they would have been key holing 50cals.
I mean per the [DOD 2023 PLA report](https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3561549/dod-releases-2023-report-on-military-and-security-developments-involving-the-pe/) the rocket force literally fired 180+ missiles that year, (literally more then every other nation *combined*) but yah, those all just exploded upon launch or couldn't take off because they were filled with water or something.
Rocket malfunctions and failures literally happen all the time, even with the US. Not the first time a Chinese rocket has failed and it wolnt be the last. At least [when their missiles malfunction no one gets killed ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsiung_Feng_III_missile_mishap).
There were a total of 180 space launches in 2022. You can check the breakdown by country here:
https://payloadspace.com/2022-orbital-launches/
In the own report you linked, it notes:
> “In 2022, China has conducted over 60 successful space launches”
Which matches Payloadspace’s numbers.
And yeah they do fail a lot. This would be China’s 5th major loss since start of 2023 out of 13 major failures total.
https://spacenews.com/surprise-chinese-lunar-mission-hit-by-launch-anomaly/
https://www.space.com/china-galactic-energy-rocket-launch-failure-september-2023
https://news.usni.org/2023/03/14/2nd-chinese-rocket-suffers-uncontrolled-break-up-over-nepal-days-after-texas-incident
https://www.space.com/chinese-rocket-stage-crashes-earth-over-texas
I guess it depends on if we're talking about missiles or rockets. It's possible the report is talking about sub orbital ballistic missiles not just space vehicles.
Im not sure at this point if people really blieve they did keyhole because the barrel is problematic
https://youtu.be/n5WoYo24QVU?feature=shared
Go to 2:03 its rubber bullets
This. It's no different than planes not having to be pointed in exactly the direction they're moving.
The rocket had already mostly flamed out after the failure, so the thrust was only enough to push it slightly off axis. It continues on its trajectory, tilting slowly to the side as a result of the force.
Also, what range safety officer doing?
Assuming they lost connection to the engines, they can’t do much anyway.
Generally, Flight Termination Systems are attached and armed prior to flight, but are not attached to the vehicle prior to static fires. On top of this, the PRC has taken the Russian approach to in-flight safety; which is to say “Debris Range Safety is for chumps, real Maos commit to the success of their design”
Just a friendly reminder that while Harbor Freight is a perfectly reasonable option for obtaining… shall we say “temporary” (?) tools and hardware, you probably don’t want to use it as a source for space-program equipment.
More like all the tiny plastic bonsai trees and the peasant couple near the stream. Plus a mill. Those things are pretty neat, you should check them out.
KSP isn't representative of real life, but that rocket launching off so close to where, to me what seems like a small town, is giving me some flashbacks of a burning launch center.
Oh so second time in a week that a first stage falls to the ground uncontrolled in great China. While Space X did like 4 Falcon 9 launches in the same time frame.
Surely the US is cooked in this new space race.
Makes sense this happened in Henan. That place literally had the highest AIDS concentration outside of Africa because when the government bought people’s blood in the 90s and early aughts they mixed some back in from an untested supply, for some reason. Makes sense they’d keep fucking them / blow them up.
Accident? No no no, this was the precise intention of this glorious Chinese rocket test. You see, not only was engine testing data gathered, but by allowing a partial accidental-looking launch, further testing and training was carried out for the fire response in the area as well as stress testing the local plumbing and laundry services after everyone who saw an "out of control rocket" headed their way shit themselves and had to wash up.
Ok so hear me out.
We colonize the moon, move the famous "Golden Billion" there. Then we nuke the shit out of key Chininese and Russian cities. We force all other non-NATO nuclear states to give up their weapons or else.
Then we move back to earth. NATO reigns supreme.
The same energy as those people running around as the unfinished home got demolished but instead of collapsing in itself properly it collapse to their direction.
First stage of "Falcon 9 with Chinese characteristics".
It was supposed to be a static fire test.
Assumedly (i.e. copying off Scott Manley), ripping itself off the test gantry damaged the rocket, and it did only a partial burn, dropping with half-full tanks of LOX and kerosene.
There's no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, a state of bliss
Can't keep my mind from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted
Just an earth-bound misfit, I
This was supposed to be a static test of the "Chinese copy of Falcon 9" first stage. It was never supposed to take off. Scott Manley suspects the boom at the end was because something damaged the engines, which failed, leaving unburnt kerosene in the tanks.
OK, I presume it's a "civilian" rocket. couple observation still:
- Smoke was clear/black they FINALLY started using something that is not turbo toxic for ther rockets (reminder: orange smoke REALLY BAD)
- No FTS? they just slammed entire thing into the ground.
What place fucked up this time?
Accidental launch of a rocket during an engine test Tianlong-3 [https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-static-fire-test-results-in-unintended-launch-and-huge-explosion/](https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-static-fire-test-results-in-unintended-launch-and-huge-explosion/)
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Jesus Christ, was there a competition to find the worst possible rocket propellant or something?
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> Flox-70 - optimal oxidizer for regular RP-1, gives it near-hydrolox performance. What is it, you ask? 30% liquid oxygen, 70% liquid fluorine. I actually nearly had a stroke reading that. When liquid oxygen is a stabilizing agent, you seriously need to reconsider the chemistry you're performing.
or don't, just keep going further
You and my grandfather would have gotten along. As a boy he was known for sneaking up on bulls and poking them with a sharpened stick - for fun! He became the town doctor but his nickname, "Shank", lasted his lifetime.
Indeed, further away from the building where these madmen are working
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Probably [Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane](Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitanehttps://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane), though I'm sure there's other Things I won't Work With that probably qualify
How do you know all of this very niche yet very interesting info?
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So you don't fuck planes like most people on this sub, you fuck rockets instead.
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Same. I have a great book, [Space Propulsion Analysis and Design](https://shop.spacetechnologyseries.com/ebooks/space-propulsion-analysis-and-design.html), that goes into stuff like that. My favorite exotic chemical propellant is metastable-Helium/Ammonia. Apparently, some European guys actually synthesized some, but apparently it's not very stable when it gets above 50k, although the specific impulse is supposed to be well over 1000 seconds.
WTF
Mild intrest?
lol, the one ton spill of chlorine trifluoride holy shit who though shipping a literal ton of that stuff was a good idea. "the concrete was on fire" what a quote.
That stuff can set asbestos on fire and make ice detonate. It's gloriously horrifying.
You've also read the book "Ignition!" haven't you :D
Look up ignition! Very fun book
>Water suspension of uranium or plutonium salt, 20% enriched - atomic monopropellant for Nuclear Salt Water Rockets. Spicy
>Beryllium hydride - investigated by Energomash in the 1960s, as part of the RD-550 motor. Storeable, designed to use alongside hydrogen peroxide oxidizer, produces vacuum Isp in the 400 sec range, which is very nice for a storeable motor. So is this more or less effective at spreading cancer than those nuclear powered cruise missiles from SLAM/Project Pluto?
Beryllium is mostly only toxic in long-term exposure, and creates an autoimmune disease in the lungs. That sucks, but it requires breathing in beryllium dust for a long time, so it really only happens to people who work in aerospace (and a few no-longer-relevant, or super obscure niche professions). Whereas spewing radioactive material across a few countries is very obviously and directly a fucking stupid idea.
ah yes, NSWR, chernobyl continuously for weeks at a time. Sea Dragon, where its engines are NSWRs, and it has multi-stage AJ260s using atomic sparkler solid boosters. for modest-sized rideshare missions into orbit around an Alderson disk
"atomic sparkler solid booster" Maybe its just because I'm tired, but I don't find anything about Sea Dragon having atomic engines. I'd like to read more about that if you have a source.
There's also one that proposed a tri-propellant engine using molten Lithium, *elemental Fluorine*, and hydrogen and that was pretty high up the list.
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I know I just meant it never saw actual use on a rocket, still was a terrible, *terrible* idea.
What do you mean "terrible idea"? It sounds fun. From https://www.quora.com/What-is-liquid-fluorine-Could-it-be-used-to-make-rocket-fuel : > In terms of energy and reactivity liquid fluorine would be an EXCELLENT rocket oxidizer. However it is so aggressively reactive that most folks would prefer to use something “tamer”. About sixty years ago I got my first professional job - right out of college. The employer was called “Rocketdyne”. They had a little, crude laboratory on a hilltop just northwest of Canoga park. I was introduced to liquid fluorine by a professional worker who had a small fused quartz container with about a pint of liquid (cryogenic) fluorine in it. In his demonstration he squirted a stream of the liquid at the ground - it almost explosively reacted and burned a “gopher-hole” instantly wherever it hit. Next he directed a stream of the LF2 at a small tree branch - It instantly burned through the branch which then fell onto the ground. Everything that the LF2 touched was instantly obliterated with a large display of smoke and fire. Later the laboratory actually did build a small rocket motor and tankage to use LF2 as the oxidizer. The pure nickel propellant tanks and lines were carefully cleaned and dried and then “passivated” by passing dry nitrogen through them with gradually increasing amounts of fluorine. The motor was left overnight and the next morning the test was scheduled. The tanks were loaded - the appropriate alarms were sounded - we observers were secured in a blockhouse to view the test (through three inch thick windows). When the propellant valves were opened the first flow of liquid fluorine arrived at the test engine - it encountered some dew that had accumulated in the engine overnight. The dew instantly ignited which ignited the engine hardware that ignited the test stand etc. etc. We dogged down the doors, turned on a flow of compressed air to keep the flow going outward and sat it out. After the smoke cleared we all breathed a sigh of relief and walked back to the “office building”. I am sure that liquid lithium is just as fun. Reactive and corrosive.
Im scared
Yes, I too am scared that we will never see those awesome molten Lithium, elemental fluorine, and hydrogen rockets again. It is a totally normal thing to be scared about.
Safety of the propellants for rockets is like barely even on the list. And the substances that are used... Kinda have to be on the ultra-spicy spectrum. Aka most rockets rely on the hypergolic reaction between oxidizer and fuel to start and keep going(aka self-ignition when mixed) with some very specific parameters: thrust, energy density, weight, ignition delay, temperature ranges etc. I recommend "Ignition" by Clarke. Pretty interesting read on the topic.
Yeah, I was going to mention that hypergolics are standard across the industry. Kind of a necessary evil for spaceflight.
Yeah, even rockets that use non-hypergolic propellants often use hypergolic ignition, by injecting a liquid that is hypergolic with liquid oxygen.
>the worst possible rocket propellant or something? ...so there was this study called [project orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion\))
I highly recommend reading Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (freely available on the internet) as a great story of why rocket fuel is always fun stuff.
It has pro and con, the problem for someone like China who boast all the time how awesome they are at construction magaprojects from HSR to skyscappers somehow construct new launch site near the sea took them years and they just keep using those toxic propellant rockets with cold war era launch sites that will have a lot of villages on crossfire for shit and giggles cuz [But we warns them to evac! We clear!]. It just they didn't care, it seems.
The list of chemicals that are combustible and somewhat stable enough to be in a rocket is surprisingly long, but unsurprisingly, a lot of those things don't like things that are alive.
It came in close second to ClF3, which is much harder to store but doesn’t really do anything worse than set everything inextinguishably on fire. This stuff will burn sand, concrete, water, asbestos, and the CO2 in a regular fire extinguisher; and is actually hypergolic with all of them. It is condensed chemical spite.
The things that are useful for a rocket fuel (a very large amount of stored chemical energy and the ability to react extremely fast with the other component involved in the mix) do happen to tend to also be very bad for most of what makes biology work.
Well it's nice for shit like satellites and things that aren't running their engines in atmosphere because it ignites on contact with oxidizer, which I believe helps to reduce engine complexity. Additionally, unlike cryogenic propellants (Liquid Hydrogen, Oxygen, Methane, etc), It won't boil off in space so for the moment it's basically a necessity for long duration deep-space missions.
https://youtu.be/KX-0Xw6kkrc?si=yb3o389pBsRFsrwS Yes. And there have been some horrible ones.
Here is my proposal: Hydrazine and Chlorine Trifluoride.
Water, best rocket fuel
Hypergolic propellants are a super annoying part of rocketry. Their special property is the fact that they automatically ignite on contact with each other. This makes them unbelievably desirable, particularly for rockets which need to be kept on standby for a long time, because they tend to be stable at room temperature, you don't need any crazy complex ignition systems in your engine, and they're nearly as reliable as you can get without using solid propellant or monopropellant, while offering far better performance. You will often see hyperbolics used for orbital manoeuvring thrusters, like the space shuttles OMS, the Apollo lunar lander engines etc. When you need it to work, but you need more performance than a basic hydrogen peroxide or cold gas thruster, you use hypergolics. The kicker is that almost every hypergolic that has those traits is also absurdly carcinogenic, toxic, and downright shitty to deal with. UDMH (Unsymmetrical\_dimethylhydrazine), often just called hydrazine (although that can refer to a broader class of hypergolic propellants) is the standard go-to and is just absolute cancer/nerve agent/skin melty juice as the comment above pointed out. That's mostly ok when it's only used in deep space, or in ICBMS (at that point you've got bigger issues than a slow death from UDMH), but when your primary launch vehicle like the Chinese Long March family use hydrazine propellants in the first stage, and when those first stages are **INTENDED** to land back on land near isolated mountain villages, that's an issue. Particularly as there's always residual UDMH and oxidizer (either nitric acid in the early days, or Dinitrogen Tetroxide these days) still in the booster tanks which, if it doesn't directly reach people can still leach into ground water.
There is one technically-hypergolic, storable propellant combination that is relatively safe and was actually flown, kerosene with high-concentration hydrogen peroxide. Both will happily sit around at STP (as long as you don't contaminate the peroxide with transition metal salts), and while not hypergolic from just pouring them together, the several hundred degrees hot steam and oxygen mixture you get from decomposing the peroxide is hypergolic with kerosene.
I can highly recommend a book that answers that, Ignition! Not too much of a science guy and even I had enjoyed reading it
people have tried all sorts of things. For instance there was research into using [chlorine triflouride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride) as the oxidizing component in rocket fuel, this is a substance so reactive that it can spontaneously ignite *concrete*. One notable professor quipped that the best safety measure when dealing with it is a good pair of running shoes.
Find a copy of John D. Clark’s book, “Ignition!” for the hilarious, terrifying history of how these evil compounds were developed. Consider that UDMH and Nitrogen Tetroxide were in no way the most dangerous chemicals that were researched after WWII. Yikes.
Fun fact: the stuff is pretty toxc even in quantities small enough that it is barely visible or not visible at all. So you need to not just stay out of the cloud, but need to stay far away from the cloud. The "run far, run fast" bit is disturbingly accurate.
Wikipedia says Tiangong-3 runs LOX/RP-1, not the red funk. You still don't want to launch a rocket that close to a city even if it's powered by unicorn farts.
One of the few cases where the carcinogenic properties are the least of your problems.
Yeah, stuff that's immediately lethal rarely causes cancer, due to the fact that corpses are immune
Chemists keep pointing at physicist for creating nuclear horrors. Physicist would point to chemicals that have no half life and cause ten times the horror at tenth the cost. In the background, a biologist is heard laughing manically.
US ICBMs used to run on the same fuels. It's what caused the [Damascus missile site explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion), which scattered the remaining bits of closed nuclear silo about 2km away. TNO as an oxidiser, and "Aerozine 50" as a fuel, which is 50% hydrazine and 50% UDMH. A mix so amazing that the missile crew had safety suits they could wear for about an hour, before either of those would eat right through it. This is what someone handling Aerozine 50 would wear: [RFHCO suit (af.mil)](https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Upcoming/Photos/igphoto/2001836486/) And it that lasted an hour.
This is some *Ignition* type shit
> including human blood (it reacts with the iron in it). There's no free iron in human blood. It's deep inside hemoglobin, and there's a shit load of organic protein to oxidize through before you get to it. WTF is even this crap? Oxidizers fuck up biomolecules and it's go fuck-all to do with whether metalloproteins are present or not.
Accidental? Are you sure there weren't protesters and/or Uyghurs in them hills?
Or somebody made a Winneh the Pooh joke on their morning stroll through the hills
Scottish Winnie the Pooh
Its a private space company so im pretty sure they dont care about protests or uyghurs for that matter
Ah yes, a "private" Chinese company. I'm sure the CCP has no say in their operation.
Held to the ground with chinesium bolts?
the infamous reliability of zedongium
Well yeah, rocket failures happen all the time, I mean even the US has quite a fe- wait what? It was just supposed to be an engine test???
They're rocketscientists, not clampscientists.
So this is the rocket equivalent of having your straps snap on your car whilst on the Dyno?
"ups"
The security clamps were designed in china while the main engine were stolen blueprints.
Somehow this rocket looks very familiar. The rocket is built by a private company. It uses Kerolox fuel, has 9 open cycle engines in the first stage and a vacuum version in the second stage. The first stage can also land and is reusable. I can't put my finger on it, but I think I've seen this somewhere else before. But I'm sure the Chinese would never copy someone else's idea. /s
Someone is either going to get fired or promoted or both.
China accidentally launched a rocket
I accidentally the ICBM, is WWIII imminent?
Did they forgot to anchor it? Or anchors were just 3 rods hammer driven into the ground?
Strap it down, give it an extra couple ugga duggas since it's a rocket, slap it, say "that ain't goin nowhere" and you're good.
Obviously, they didn't give it the two tuggs and slap and say, "That ain't going nowhere."
Fastened with the highest quality construction grade rebar in the Peoples’ Republic
Held down with a bunch of “yeah, it’ll hold” mixed in with some “trust me.”
Hilarious that they have a whole branch of their military called a "Rocket Force" and they still get massive fuckups like this. Also hilarious that despite having a "rocket force", they're this far behind the US.
but this time they didnt kill civilians
Static rocket test, but hold the static
why is the rocket not pointy? they never watched The dictator?
It wasn’t supposed to launch lol. It was supposed to be a fire test but it broke free. This might actually be a world first.
I want to break free - The missile
I have no idea how to do it, but I feel like using the AI voice from the missile meme to read the lyrics would go well.
The missile knows where it is, and it's desired location isn't it's current location.
Actually it happened to an American rocket once… 72 years ago. Except that one was launched in the middle of nowhere instead of on the outskirts of a city with 800k people.
Should've tapped the rocket after strapping it down and said, "that ain't going anywhere."
"Explain to me how this bomb will not land in Israel and then, literally, bounce right back and blow up Wadiya" \>rocket with round nose blows up in country of launch Aladeen was right
Between this and the top post about keyholing rifles, I’m completely convinced that the J-20 is a formidable competitor to the F-35. (Definitely the US doesn’t know of a fatal weakness and is being silent about it like the T-72 turret.)
I’m just glad Boeing isn’t making the F-35 and hope that they can bring our astronauts home safely.
Boeing doesn't make aircraft they make money :)
They make whistleblowers unalive.
uh oh, you just made a serious allegation against boeing now you have to get in the *forever box*
boeing heard "there is competition from china!" and decided to beat them at their highest stat, failure rate. P.S. I pay the extra for the Airbus flight every time I can!
Publicly, the stealth only fully works from the front aspect because j-20s are designed very specifically to hamper US expeditionary capability by being disposable air tanker killers of desperation.
Idk if you can classify China's only "5th gen" aircraft as a "killer of desperation". Which makes them expensive kamikaze drones
You said it, not me. 天安門廣場
The keyholing post was a photoshop of a picture a guy took of some of his targets he laid out and a stock photo of a Chinese soldier. You can also tell by the fact that the targets and the bullet holes are gigantic compared to the guy. We like to clown on the PLA for their lack of combat experience but from what we've gathered the Chinese do the basics pretty well all things considered.
It's good you mentioned this, it's also important that the comments under that post did include a video from the PLA where they were running around a training course and thye were key holing targets. That being said I was quite worried when I say the soldier in front of the targets cause at that scale they would have been key holing 50cals.
The keyholing post was poor-quality photoshop
I mean per the [DOD 2023 PLA report](https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3561549/dod-releases-2023-report-on-military-and-security-developments-involving-the-pe/) the rocket force literally fired 180+ missiles that year, (literally more then every other nation *combined*) but yah, those all just exploded upon launch or couldn't take off because they were filled with water or something. Rocket malfunctions and failures literally happen all the time, even with the US. Not the first time a Chinese rocket has failed and it wolnt be the last. At least [when their missiles malfunction no one gets killed ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsiung_Feng_III_missile_mishap).
There were a total of 180 space launches in 2022. You can check the breakdown by country here: https://payloadspace.com/2022-orbital-launches/ In the own report you linked, it notes: > “In 2022, China has conducted over 60 successful space launches” Which matches Payloadspace’s numbers. And yeah they do fail a lot. This would be China’s 5th major loss since start of 2023 out of 13 major failures total. https://spacenews.com/surprise-chinese-lunar-mission-hit-by-launch-anomaly/ https://www.space.com/china-galactic-energy-rocket-launch-failure-september-2023 https://news.usni.org/2023/03/14/2nd-chinese-rocket-suffers-uncontrolled-break-up-over-nepal-days-after-texas-incident https://www.space.com/chinese-rocket-stage-crashes-earth-over-texas
I guess it depends on if we're talking about missiles or rockets. It's possible the report is talking about sub orbital ballistic missiles not just space vehicles.
Im not sure at this point if people really blieve they did keyhole because the barrel is problematic https://youtu.be/n5WoYo24QVU?feature=shared Go to 2:03 its rubber bullets
The physics of that still-ascending-slowly-at-a-near-45-degree angle at the end are wild
Er I should say at the end of it gaining altitude, obviously the end features a descend and then boom
The amount of force behind this was insane.
I think it's mostly just momentum, but yeah. If it's at an angle there's still technically vertical force. \ = <- + ^
This. It's no different than planes not having to be pointed in exactly the direction they're moving. The rocket had already mostly flamed out after the failure, so the thrust was only enough to push it slightly off axis. It continues on its trajectory, tilting slowly to the side as a result of the force. Also, what range safety officer doing?
Exactly this also, I guess if it was an engine test I can sort of understand it, but you still should have \*some\* sort of safety kill switch
Assuming they lost connection to the engines, they can’t do much anyway. Generally, Flight Termination Systems are attached and armed prior to flight, but are not attached to the vehicle prior to static fires. On top of this, the PRC has taken the Russian approach to in-flight safety; which is to say “Debris Range Safety is for chumps, real Maos commit to the success of their design”
The people who posted these videos online lost 1000 social credit points lmao
They deserve to lose a lot more for such a terrible camera work. How hard is it to keep a falling missile in frame?
r/killthecameraman like literally?
Oh damn, I better hurry and cancel my order!! 😳 _And they had such a great price_ !😔 🤣
Good work, 47!
Now destroy the virus
When you build your ICBM using eco friendly materials and galvanized square steel
And with screws borrowed from your aunt
This is actually just a successful Exceptionally Short Range Ballistic Missile (E-SRBM) launch
Intra-China Ballistic Missile
*Made in China* printed all over it.
It’s an ICBM. Intra-city ballistic missile
The crazy thing is this was supposed to be a static fire test. It wasn’t even supposed to fly
> It wasn’t even supposed to fly Evidently the crowd responsible didn't do enough supposing; skill issue tbh
*["We have Koyaanisqatsi at home..."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OacVy8_nJi0)*
oh that was the name of one of the movies I was looking for, thanks!
Guys how credible it is to build rocket site right next to residential areas?
If you force your rocket engineers' families to live within the blast radius of a failure, the engineers will concentrate harder. /s
Testing range also from Temu
That's not intercontinental, that's barely 500 feet.
Intracontinental ballistic missile!
Suburban ballistic missile, the next wunderwaffe in the war against nimbys
more like intraregional
Fuck it Local ballistic missile
Backyard Ballistic Missile, anyone?
Barely Ballistic Missile
Just a friendly reminder that while Harbor Freight is a perfectly reasonable option for obtaining… shall we say “temporary” (?) tools and hardware, you probably don’t want to use it as a source for space-program equipment.
"Hazard Fraught"
Kerbal Space Program is looking very realistic these days.
someone thought the rockets were still filled with water instead of fuel and was pressing buttons for fun
差不多！
[There's a reason why you don't launch huge rockets in the middile of a populated area....](https://youtu.be/MC0K3muUJp0?t=556)
this wasn't a launch silly westoid
What is emergency-self-destruct doing?
The emergency self destruct worked perfectly once the rocket came into contact with the surface!
Safety regulations were followed dutifully, and everyone in the vicinity had already been evacuated before the launch!
>buy your ICBMs on Temu Same thing happened when I bought one of those little desktop zen mist gardens.
it accidentally launched itself?
More like all the tiny plastic bonsai trees and the peasant couple near the stream. Plus a mill. Those things are pretty neat, you should check them out.
Interesting strategy Xi. Didn't think you were gonna nuke yourself.
Fast shipping ✅ Frictionless returns and warranty process ❌
KSP isn't representative of real life, but that rocket launching off so close to where, to me what seems like a small town, is giving me some flashbacks of a burning launch center.
SpaceX: We hit new milestones and this flight was a huge success and we've gathered some great data
Everything past ignition was a bonus!
When you order a falcon 9 from wish.
99% first time buyer discount is hard to resist.
-100000 social credits for the scientists and engineers who built that rocket
-100 for the scientists, -100000 for rhe villagers who filmed and posted online
Mom: we have spaceX at home
It never ceases to amaze me how much the Chinese don't give a fuck about launching rockets over, and right next to, populated areas.
Oh so second time in a week that a first stage falls to the ground uncontrolled in great China. While Space X did like 4 Falcon 9 launches in the same time frame. Surely the US is cooked in this new space race.
This was a test by a new company. I wouldn't read too much in it.
Makes sense this happened in Henan. That place literally had the highest AIDS concentration outside of Africa because when the government bought people’s blood in the 90s and early aughts they mixed some back in from an untested supply, for some reason. Makes sense they’d keep fucking them / blow them up.
What the fuck is a self destruct mechanism. Seriously. Chinese ICBMs and space payload delivery systems don't have self destruct mechanism.
When the static fire isn't static
Accident? No no no, this was the precise intention of this glorious Chinese rocket test. You see, not only was engine testing data gathered, but by allowing a partial accidental-looking launch, further testing and training was carried out for the fire response in the area as well as stress testing the local plumbing and laundry services after everyone who saw an "out of control rocket" headed their way shit themselves and had to wash up.
You've got it all wrong! ICBM stands for *Intra* Continental Ballistic Missile! So it works as intended. Checkmate West.
Phew thank goodness that village protected that uninhabited side of the mountain.
I swear to god if you muted the chinese voices in the video and put the voices of the jawas on it.. you wouldnt tell if it was the original or not.
Ok so hear me out. We colonize the moon, move the famous "Golden Billion" there. Then we nuke the shit out of key Chininese and Russian cities. We force all other non-NATO nuclear states to give up their weapons or else. Then we move back to earth. NATO reigns supreme.
those poor fucking animals there man wtf
Most safety conscious chinese launch vehicle
The same energy as those people running around as the unfinished home got demolished but instead of collapsing in itself properly it collapse to their direction.
This is their Space X Falcon 9 clone.
*jingle* SHOP LIKE A BILLIONAIRE *Temu* SHOP LIKE A BILLIONAIRE *Temu* F that ad.
Who is holding that damn camera?
Was the explosion caused by the warhead? Or was it just purely the fuel?
First stage of "Falcon 9 with Chinese characteristics". It was supposed to be a static fire test. Assumedly (i.e. copying off Scott Manley), ripping itself off the test gantry damaged the rocket, and it did only a partial burn, dropping with half-full tanks of LOX and kerosene.
Mhmmm, tasty RFNA
Do these retards not have their own testing sites?
I see it included the Temu Auto-destruct package as well
There's no sensation to compare with this Suspended animation, a state of bliss Can't keep my mind from the circling skies Tongue-tied and twisted Just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tested a launch and impact
Why did it not have a self destruct?
This was supposed to be a static test of the "Chinese copy of Falcon 9" first stage. It was never supposed to take off. Scott Manley suspects the boom at the end was because something damaged the engines, which failed, leaving unburnt kerosene in the tanks.
that ain't an ICBM , that thing didn't even get to the stratosphere
Ah, I know whats wrong with it... Aint got no pointy tip!
Made in China
Rookie mistake
OK, I presume it's a "civilian" rocket. couple observation still: - Smoke was clear/black they FINALLY started using something that is not turbo toxic for ther rockets (reminder: orange smoke REALLY BAD) - No FTS? they just slammed entire thing into the ground.
Not enough struts
> AliExpress "New SpaceHex 1pcs, best price of world"
About 20 seconds in you can hear him go “well shit”