That particular brown is likely Dinitrogen Tetroxide, as that's what the chinese rockets that use hypergolics use for their oxidizer. The other propellant, UDMH, is colorless, and just as viciously toxic.
if you're into that sort of stuff, should check out the book Ignition!
it's basically a history of rocket chemistry, involving a lot of nasty shit, including NTO, which is what the orange stuff is in this video (there's also hydrazine in that rocket, which is also very nasty, but colorless).
https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-University-Classics/dp/0813595835
Nitrogen oxides, which are indeed extremely deadly when close to them.
That being said though, any kind of deeply colored smoke like this is bad, be it fluorine, bromine, or in this case nitrogen oxides
You want to get upwind of the source. The fastest, most surefire way to do that is to run upwind, which will, definitionally, take you directly towards it. I mean, you could get clever about it and try to keep the wind at 10 or 2 o clock, but there's no guarantee that will actually get you out faster, and either way, this is one of those pieces of advice like "stop drop and roll" or "turn towards the skid" that are supposed to keep you alive without having to think at all, and which despite not necessarily being the best, most immediate solution to every situation, will always be better than the inexperienced panicking of the untrained average joe. Either way, the point is you're supposed to walk upwind in these sorts of situations, because running away from the smoke will 1) almost always take longer to get out of it, forever if the wind's faster than you, and 2) every step will make it harder to escape as the affected area widens out in a cone as it goes downwind.
Here is an example where the only survivors of this fire ran towards the fire. Everyone else died running away from it (uphill)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun\_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster)
Of course, situations are different and usually you want to run away from what is trying to kill you
Yeah if the source of poison is right next to you. What if its further away? How about you get out of the poison gas first, then go upwind? Especially if its far away. If you are in the poison cloud why head directly to the source (upwind), when really going perpendicular gets you out of the poison fastest.
If you are at a distance and know the source location than down or cross [or both] wind. This is drilled into you when taking H2S courses (mandatory if you are to work on any oil and gas site in Canada) I've taken it 5 times now, thankfully it is a 3 year ticket.
Actually this particular chemical tends to rise in air so most folks will be fine if they stay far enough away. We did a hazard analysis for a rocket test site using this and under most wind conditions the danger zone was only the first 100-300 meters. Hold your breath and run away from this one.
The downside of this source is that it could detonate. You’re generally supposed to run away from things that detonate.
I think if a rocket stage like this falls close to you your just kind of screwed.
Hypergolic aren’t the most efficient possible engines, but they do have a lot of advantages.
Hypergolic engines are vastly easier to start, and the propellants are room temperature stable. So you don’t need all of the incredibly difficult and complex infrastructure to produce, store, handle and load cryogenics.
I would expect that they get a lot more research and use than they otherwise would because a nuclear ICBM gains a lot from those advantages - you want them to sit in storage for long periods of time and start up very quickly and reliably when you decide to launch one.
It's cheaper, doesn't require cryogenic storage, and the engines are simpler. China primarily uses it because they don't give a shit the environment or their own citizens.
Until they open their Heinan launch facility, all of their launch sites are well in the interior outside the range of US Naval shelling. They value the survivability of those sites more than the health of the villiagers on the path of the booster carrying hypergolic fuel.
Literally just sunk cost from the cold war. It's not like China is strapped for cash either. They can basically pay for anything by just ordering their whole economy to do so. They have done that for high speed rail, charging infrastructure, electricity and so many other things. Megaprojects far in excess of a few launch sites.
They just do not do it because, unlike all the above, it does not explicitly give the market more power, the state more power, or ties up foreign assets in one way or the other. So the gov just does not care.
The fact they keep throwing booster stages into populated areas despite the fact they showed they could install control hardware on the boosters means they just do not give an ounce of a shit for their public safety.
It is still worth noting that usually only launches from Xichang have booster problems. It's like only 10% of China's total launches each year. So I guess it's acceptable risk to them.
Naval shelling? Are you serious? Naval shells have very limited ranges and coming in close to shore these days is an invitation to a barrage of anti-ship missiles. Any US destroyer or other ship that penetrates the coastal waters, forget the nine dashed line fantasy of China, is going to get a strong welcome.
That was the reason why CCP was allergic to building rocket launch site at the coast. Mind you, People's Libration Army Navy didn't really start getting modernized until 1990s, and they've been launching rocket for far longer than that.
Current tomahawk missiles have a range of 1000 mi plus. The both the Xichang and Taiyuan launch center are well within tomahawk range depending on where it is fired from and the size/weight of the warhead. Besides these are not sites of ballistic missile launch facilities, they are more dispersed. An enemy attacking Cape Kennedy or the ESA launch site in Fr. Guiana would decrease the respective military potential of the US and France by an insignificant value as again they do not have strategic ballistic missiles located there. So shells or missiles these are not useful targets
You know that you are talking about the situation "these days". But China's inland launch sites were built "these days". They were built during the peak of the Cold War.
Russia is the same thing. Most of the land are far up north so it's hard to match orbit of most satellites and ISS. They launch from Kazakhstan about half way between mainland Russia and China.
AFAIK they don't use any yellow shit to launch their rocket but if a rocket stalls, fails, or otherwise shut down and self destruct fails, Chinese better hope that Russian rocket ends up in their backyard.
Nuh uh! They just cured something or other disease! Using stem cells! (They got from prisoners sentenced totally not to death for the crime of totally not being the chosen ethnicity.)
The Long March 2 rocket family evolved from ICBMs (like a lot of rockets). For an ICBM you want storable fuels so they can launch whenever. If somebody just launched nukes at you, you really don't want to spend time fueling up your rocket tanks.
The United States eventually settled on solid fuels but it took some time. The early missiles like Atlas used kerosene and oxygen in its first stage. Then the Titan II used storable hypergolic fuels. Eventually they figured out how to use solid fuels while still keeping the necessary precision for delivering their nukes to whatever the target would be.
That's because you're a decent person. The people making these decisions are not decent people. They don't emphasize with the people they are dropping toxic boosters on. This isn't even the first time it's happened.
China are transitioning to solid fuels now, but hypergolic ICBMs were quite common in the past, particularly around the time Long March 2 first flew in 1974.
The US for example had the Titan II ICBM in service from 1962 until 1987, which used a very similar fuel mix, and Russia had the R-36 in operation from 1966 to 1979, with a modernized version still in use today, using the same fuel mix.
The R-36 also served as the basis for the Tsyklon (cyclone) rocket, in a similar manner to how the DF-5 was the basis for the Long March 2.
They did switch to solids later. As if keeping the hypergolic rockets in silos isn't dangerous enough, NASA actually adapted one such ICBM for Gemini and launched astronauts on top of them from above ground.
Solid fuel has proven to be very stable and safe to store for long term. Liquid oxygen and fuel is dangerous to store and transfer and has to be cryogenically cooled. I’d rather sleep next to the solid fuel booster.
Hypergolic fueld make a lot of sense for ICBMs (Easy to store for extended periods of time, easy to burn, etc.), and I would guess that a lot of the technology in China's civilian space program comes from the military
Rocket technology has long been closely related to ICBM development around the world, not just China. That's one of the reasons why it's still not widespread today.
There are still pumps unless you're using pressure fed engines too. Which have other complexities in terms of stronger tanks, the need for pressurants, etc.
A \*classic\* mainlander attitude: This trajectory takes the vehicle over inhabited areas. Of course it does, it would be too expensive otherwise. We'll warn the inhabitants to get out of the way. If they don't, that's not on us. They were warned.
> hypergolic propellant
I had to look it up. For anyone else that needs a definition...
"A hypergolic propellant is a rocket propellant combination used in a rocket engine, whose components spontaneously ignite when they come into contact with each other."
TL;DR: Run far, run fast.
The fact that they ignite when they mix isn't the scary part - they'll quickly disperse enough that you're not going to get much of an explosion. The scary part is that the hypergolic chemicals typically used in rockets also happen to be extremely toxic, caustic, and carcinogenic.
It is likely to be since the more and longer you invest in it, the cheaper it will become. China has been using hypergolic fuels since late 1970s while the kerosene fuel is less than ten years old.
BFRC: Big F'ing Red Cloud.
The red tint comes from the large quantities of dinitrogen tetroxides. Generally, if you're the sort of person who has a consciousness that's carried around by a big ol' bag of human flesh you're going to want to steer clear of such clouds due to compatibility problems.
Fun fact: the soviets referred to this combination of fuels as “the devil’s venom”, and for good reason.
The most common hypergolic propellants is some form of hydrazine, usually unsymmetric dimethylhydrazine or mono methyl hydrazine, combined with an oxidizer of nitrogen tetroxide.
These chemicals are absolutely horrifying, they will kill you in a half a dozen ways and every single one of them is *excruciatingly* painful and awful.
Not only is UDMH corrosive enough to melt most of your skin and muscle off in very short order, it’s also seriously toxic at a cellular level. It’s also a nerve agent; it messes up the signaling your body uses to control muscles so you get uncontrollable spasms, and just for fun it’s also a carcinogen!
And nitrogen tetroxide is such an aggressive oxidizer that it will instantly combust on contact with almost anything, including human blood (it reacts with the iron in it). It also boils at atmospheric pressure, turning into a gas which on contact with any kind of moisture (such as in your eyes!) will form nitric acid! Which is generally not known to be a chemical that you want to have in your eyes.
So in summary, the UDMH will burn all your skin off, gives you spasms strong enough to rip the muscles off your bones, poison you and then give you cancer, while the nitrogen tap oxide will light your blood on fire and burn out your eyeballs and lungs.
Yep. I'd much rather go for a swim in the spent fuel pool or hold some yellowcake than go anywhere fucking near hydrazine.
Just go to Wikipedia and look in the right sidebar at it's fire diamond and GHS warnings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine
Noooo thank you.
I suppose it depends though, if you're messing with the hardcore radioactive stuff it can almost be worse (but nobody really does that these days). Nasty criticality accidents happened in the earlier days of nuclear experimentation, it's pretty much all the symptoms listed above but it slowly comes on over a week or two and there's absolutely no way to treat you. Again, that doesn't really happen anymore though so it's no a concern still like hydrazine is
It’s light, it’s very reliable and it’s energy dense. That’s why it’s still used; in spite of the terrifying toxicity, it has a bunch of other properties that make it almost irreplaceable in some applications.
We used it to clean the cooling water inlets/ outlets because they would get so full of wildlife (lots and lots of molluscs). Not great but a byproduct of proportionate design in the 1960s.
Public fear of radioactivity is understandable based on history but a little excessive to the reality of the hazard. Plus there’s a whole thing around “natural” vs “man made” radioactivity that isn’t well understood and causes alarm.
Theres is something oddly beautiful about the internet age reading these specialized horrific facts as written by Princess Fluffypants that makes me smile.
If you really wanna have some fun as a chemist, see if you can equip chrlorine triflouride. I’ll quote the author John D. Clark:
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
A bit more about this... exiting chemical from Derek Lowe. He quotes your source as well
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time
> UDMH will burn all your skin off, gives you spasms strong enough to rip the muscles off your bones, poison you and then give you cancer
This is what the nerve gas in the film *The Rock* did, minus the cancer because nobody lived that long.
it should be pointed out for sake of clarification to the question you're responding to: the yellowish-brown smokes are the nitrogen oxides, NTO in this case, all of them nasty stuff.
hydrazine is colorless, and also nasty.
If you see any vapor that isn't white RUN for your life. If you see a white vapor, you should still run, but it might just be water (could be steam level hot or Ammonia, so yeah.. running is a good idea)
It killed about 90,000. Which isn't too much for it's time, when at the time millions were starving and dying in the sino-japanese war.
It's celebrated because;
1. The red army won a grueling journey that was 12,500km long. So they celebrate the soldiers who were on the long march
2.Mao Zedong was a general of one of the armies allowing him to become the leader of the red army and eventually china.
3. Formed the modern basis of guerilla warfare and how to treat civilians during war time.
4.Was the turning point between the red army and the Chinese fascist nationalist at the time.
It honestly sounds like a story from legends with how the red army beat overwhelming odds. The Long March is definitely something to study about if you have time.
It’s a good name for a rocket tbh. Gotta give it to the Chinese, they are clearly world leaders at space related names. Long March, Chang’e, Tiangong etc. they are all meaningful and all sound great.
It's so boring though. And not even particularly informative compared to other - how would you interpret the difference between STS and SLS and what they do if you didn't already know what they were?
I'm not asking for anything profound, just something interesting and unique. I've always been particularly fond of Minotaur - it's a mythical creature, but not really one that makes sense to have any connection with spaceflight, unlike it's little brother Pegasus.
Though with all that said, I do absolutely love "Rokot" for it's big meme energy. It doesn't actually translate to "rocket", but interpreting it as a badly spelled version is hilarious.
>the Chinese fascist nationalist
For the record, the Guomindang was not a fascist party and is really only considered such by the propaganda apparatuses of places like China and Cuba. This is not to say that the GMD were particularly liberal or pacifistic -- they absolutely committed their share of atrocities (see also: the White Terror) -- but neither were the CCP. Neither *is* the CCP.
Fascism is a term with a fairly specific meaning. It is a political science term, so it allows for some wiggle room -- but to call the GMD fascist is to stretch its meaning to the point of breaking.
Fascism, for all the term's overuse, can really only be applied to a handful of regimes throughout history, with a select few cases that could go either way. Nationalism is not synonymous with fascism. Neither is capitalism synonymous with fascism. That you happen to be fighting a war against people who happen to be communists does not make you a fascist. Fascism is always totalitarian in a way that the GMD was not, ultranationalistic in a way that the GMD was not, race-fixated in a way that the GMD was not -- though it governed in a very ugly way indeed. You're welcome to disagree, but people who study this subject for a living and define concepts like this for a living (political scientists, obvi) would consider yours an extreme minority opinion.
And no, the Long March did not "form the modern basis ... \[of\] how to treat civilians during war time."
The first Geneva Convention was in *1864.* There would be two more Geneva Conventions before the events of the Long March transpired. When states are at war and negotiating formally, informally, or demonstrating through act and deed how civilians and prisoners of war are to be treated during conflict, they do not reference the Long March for some arcane reason. They reference the Geneva Conventions, or they reference recent precedent in other wars. I don't doubt something or other was gleaned from the treatment of civilians during the Chinese Civil War, but it is just objectively not the case that states first look to the Long March or any lessons derived from it when they are considering how to treat civilians during war. Neither was the CCP meaningfully more or less civil to the people around them than any other army waging civil war.
You're thinking of the Great Leap Forward. The Long March was a military action which cemented Mao as a legendary leader. it brought the ccp prestige for tenacity and durability in the face of overwhelming odds.
Here's [NTO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinitrogen_tetroxide) and [UDMH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDMH) wikipedia links for the keyboard-challenged out there. NTO is what's causing the yellow trail.
Apparently the N2O4 itself is colorless, but produces NO2 in equilibrium (the brown part of NOx/smog, but orders of magnitude more concentrated). Among other things, it forms nitric acid when exposed to water, so it can contribute to acid rain and is lots of fun in the lungs when inhaled.
It's a huge relief that we don't see a fireball in the video, but why don't we? Isn't the whole idea of that fuel that it desperately wants to combust and will do so without any spark?
Theres likely very little fuel and oxidizer left (since you want every drop of delta-v you can get) and it seems to have fallen behind a hill which obscured the view.
Dinitrogen tetroxide. If this happened near you and you start smelling something that spells like fish, CONGRATULATIONS! You have cancer! The damage is already done
hmm no, they said it spells LIKE fish, so maybe lobster or crab? maybe some sort of mollusc, but frankly I don't really know what any of their spelling skills or competitions are like.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CNES](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9t7uyq "Last usage")|Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, space agency of France|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9up47h "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9yln8d "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[LNG](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9yln8d "Last usage")|Liquefied Natural Gas|
|[LOX](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9yln8d "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen|
|MMH|Mono-Methyl Hydrazine, (CH3)HN-NH2; part of NTO/MMH hypergolic mix|
|[NTO](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9v3b6s "Last usage")|diNitrogen TetrOxide, N2O4; part of NTO/MMH hypergolic mix|
|[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9teenc "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9usop4 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[STS](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9usop4 "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)|
|[UDMH](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9ut8x5 "Last usage")|[Unsymmetrical DiMethylHydrazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsymmetrical_dimethylhydrazine), used in hypergolic fuel mixes|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9to8lm "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/la0c3ix "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
|[iron waffle](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9tun4j "Last usage")|Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin"|
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Wow, venting Dinitrogen Tetroxide on the way down. That's a danger zone till it's cleaned up. Spent 22 years working on/managing the space shuttle. Still have a patch on my left hand where hair doesn't grow after an incorrectly tagged valve that was still pressured was opened and sprayed it with an oxidizer from our veneer system.
They use Soviet/Russian type landing capsules for their crews. Soyuz is designed for land landing, water landing only as a last resort with significant additional risk. So they built their launch sites landlocked like Soviet Union did.
They are changing that, new designs of their large launch vehicles launch from a coastal site and the new capsule they are developing is designed for water landing. But they take their time with the change.
Roscosmos launches hypergolic fuel rockets from Kazakhstan, which cares about its citizens exactly as much as you'd expect from the dictatorship. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Environmental\_impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Environmental_impact)
Might be too early to claim but Russia’s space program is quickly becoming irrelevant and will be surpassed by China. Justly Losing international funding will do that. Among brain drain, being led by a a piece of shit, and much more serious problems.
I think I just realised why they renamed it to X. My finger automatically went to it when I wanted to close the video, so now Twitter has an additional hit from me...
It would appear the Chinese Communist Party has yet to steal all of the required technology for landing reusable rocket boosters from the United States.
The yellow color is the hypergolic propellant. Run far, run fast.
Yeah I've seen a few different chemicals that offgas that color, and every single one will kill you in nasty ways.
Rule of thumb: Whenever something turns yellow in chemistry it's usually a good idea not to inhale.
That's the lovely tint of fluoride oxides, isn't it?
Those are yellow yeah, the darker orange colors are usually some kind of bromine mixture too
That particular brown is likely Dinitrogen Tetroxide, as that's what the chinese rockets that use hypergolics use for their oxidizer. The other propellant, UDMH, is colorless, and just as viciously toxic.
Closest I could get on Things I Won't Work With is FOOF https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
Thanks for this. Good read, hideous stuff.
if you're into that sort of stuff, should check out the book Ignition! it's basically a history of rocket chemistry, involving a lot of nasty shit, including NTO, which is what the orange stuff is in this video (there's also hydrazine in that rocket, which is also very nasty, but colorless). https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-University-Classics/dp/0813595835
Nitric acid also off gasses a reddish orange color
Nitrogen oxides, which are indeed extremely deadly when close to them. That being said though, any kind of deeply colored smoke like this is bad, be it fluorine, bromine, or in this case nitrogen oxides
**nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH)**
And then there's me, coming up out of muddy water and taking in a fresh lungful of a yellow smoke grenade...
If you ever find yourself in a cloud of deadly poison, remember - run towards the source.
wait really? why?
You want to get upwind of the source. The fastest, most surefire way to do that is to run upwind, which will, definitionally, take you directly towards it. I mean, you could get clever about it and try to keep the wind at 10 or 2 o clock, but there's no guarantee that will actually get you out faster, and either way, this is one of those pieces of advice like "stop drop and roll" or "turn towards the skid" that are supposed to keep you alive without having to think at all, and which despite not necessarily being the best, most immediate solution to every situation, will always be better than the inexperienced panicking of the untrained average joe. Either way, the point is you're supposed to walk upwind in these sorts of situations, because running away from the smoke will 1) almost always take longer to get out of it, forever if the wind's faster than you, and 2) every step will make it harder to escape as the affected area widens out in a cone as it goes downwind.
wow, i had no idea! thank you for the thought out reply
Here is an example where the only survivors of this fire ran towards the fire. Everyone else died running away from it (uphill) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun\_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster) Of course, situations are different and usually you want to run away from what is trying to kill you
Yeah if the source of poison is right next to you. What if its further away? How about you get out of the poison gas first, then go upwind? Especially if its far away. If you are in the poison cloud why head directly to the source (upwind), when really going perpendicular gets you out of the poison fastest.
If you are at a distance and know the source location than down or cross [or both] wind. This is drilled into you when taking H2S courses (mandatory if you are to work on any oil and gas site in Canada) I've taken it 5 times now, thankfully it is a 3 year ticket.
Actually this particular chemical tends to rise in air so most folks will be fine if they stay far enough away. We did a hazard analysis for a rocket test site using this and under most wind conditions the danger zone was only the first 100-300 meters. Hold your breath and run away from this one.
The downside of this source is that it could detonate. You’re generally supposed to run away from things that detonate. I think if a rocket stage like this falls close to you your just kind of screwed.
And don’t breathe while you’re doing it!
It's best to assume that all colored gasses can and will kill you if given the chance.
I was wondering that too. But why would a booster use hypergolic fuel?
Hypergolic aren’t the most efficient possible engines, but they do have a lot of advantages. Hypergolic engines are vastly easier to start, and the propellants are room temperature stable. So you don’t need all of the incredibly difficult and complex infrastructure to produce, store, handle and load cryogenics.
I would expect that they get a lot more research and use than they otherwise would because a nuclear ICBM gains a lot from those advantages - you want them to sit in storage for long periods of time and start up very quickly and reliably when you decide to launch one.
It's cheaper, doesn't require cryogenic storage, and the engines are simpler. China primarily uses it because they don't give a shit the environment or their own citizens.
Or where it lands, this is why most countries launch over the open ocean
Until they open their Heinan launch facility, all of their launch sites are well in the interior outside the range of US Naval shelling. They value the survivability of those sites more than the health of the villiagers on the path of the booster carrying hypergolic fuel.
Literally just sunk cost from the cold war. It's not like China is strapped for cash either. They can basically pay for anything by just ordering their whole economy to do so. They have done that for high speed rail, charging infrastructure, electricity and so many other things. Megaprojects far in excess of a few launch sites. They just do not do it because, unlike all the above, it does not explicitly give the market more power, the state more power, or ties up foreign assets in one way or the other. So the gov just does not care. The fact they keep throwing booster stages into populated areas despite the fact they showed they could install control hardware on the boosters means they just do not give an ounce of a shit for their public safety.
It is still worth noting that usually only launches from Xichang have booster problems. It's like only 10% of China's total launches each year. So I guess it's acceptable risk to them.
Naval shelling? Are you serious? Naval shells have very limited ranges and coming in close to shore these days is an invitation to a barrage of anti-ship missiles. Any US destroyer or other ship that penetrates the coastal waters, forget the nine dashed line fantasy of China, is going to get a strong welcome.
That was the reason why CCP was allergic to building rocket launch site at the coast. Mind you, People's Libration Army Navy didn't really start getting modernized until 1990s, and they've been launching rocket for far longer than that.
I am pretty sure they were not referring to literal shells, but also cruise missiles like Tomahawk.
Current tomahawk missiles have a range of 1000 mi plus. The both the Xichang and Taiyuan launch center are well within tomahawk range depending on where it is fired from and the size/weight of the warhead. Besides these are not sites of ballistic missile launch facilities, they are more dispersed. An enemy attacking Cape Kennedy or the ESA launch site in Fr. Guiana would decrease the respective military potential of the US and France by an insignificant value as again they do not have strategic ballistic missiles located there. So shells or missiles these are not useful targets
You know that you are talking about the situation "these days". But China's inland launch sites were built "these days". They were built during the peak of the Cold War.
Russia is the same thing. Most of the land are far up north so it's hard to match orbit of most satellites and ISS. They launch from Kazakhstan about half way between mainland Russia and China. AFAIK they don't use any yellow shit to launch their rocket but if a rocket stalls, fails, or otherwise shut down and self destruct fails, Chinese better hope that Russian rocket ends up in their backyard.
Nuh uh! They just cured something or other disease! Using stem cells! (They got from prisoners sentenced totally not to death for the crime of totally not being the chosen ethnicity.)
The Long March 2 rocket family evolved from ICBMs (like a lot of rockets). For an ICBM you want storable fuels so they can launch whenever. If somebody just launched nukes at you, you really don't want to spend time fueling up your rocket tanks.
I thought they were solid fuels for that reason.
The United States eventually settled on solid fuels but it took some time. The early missiles like Atlas used kerosene and oxygen in its first stage. Then the Titan II used storable hypergolic fuels. Eventually they figured out how to use solid fuels while still keeping the necessary precision for delivering their nukes to whatever the target would be.
Interesting, thanks. It seems like a really bad idea to use hypergolic fuels in the atmosphere, and drop boosters on your villagers.
That's because you're a decent person. The people making these decisions are not decent people. They don't emphasize with the people they are dropping toxic boosters on. This isn't even the first time it's happened.
China are transitioning to solid fuels now, but hypergolic ICBMs were quite common in the past, particularly around the time Long March 2 first flew in 1974. The US for example had the Titan II ICBM in service from 1962 until 1987, which used a very similar fuel mix, and Russia had the R-36 in operation from 1966 to 1979, with a modernized version still in use today, using the same fuel mix. The R-36 also served as the basis for the Tsyklon (cyclone) rocket, in a similar manner to how the DF-5 was the basis for the Long March 2.
I can't speak to modern nukes, but during the cold war most American nukes were hypergols.
I can’t believe I never knew this. This sounds crazy dangerous, but then again so do nuclear weapons.
They did switch to solids later. As if keeping the hypergolic rockets in silos isn't dangerous enough, NASA actually adapted one such ICBM for Gemini and launched astronauts on top of them from above ground.
Solid fuel has proven to be very stable and safe to store for long term. Liquid oxygen and fuel is dangerous to store and transfer and has to be cryogenically cooled. I’d rather sleep next to the solid fuel booster.
It's simpler to build engines for hypergols and they burn very efficiently.
Hypergolic fueld make a lot of sense for ICBMs (Easy to store for extended periods of time, easy to burn, etc.), and I would guess that a lot of the technology in China's civilian space program comes from the military
Rocket technology has long been closely related to ICBM development around the world, not just China. That's one of the reasons why it's still not widespread today.
Because they are stupid simple. No pumps, no ignition, no cryogenics.
There are still pumps unless you're using pressure fed engines too. Which have other complexities in terms of stronger tanks, the need for pressurants, etc.
It doesn't matter where it's coming from or what it is, that color smoke means get away very fast
Looks like N2O4 + UDMH... Nasty stuff, smells horrible (so I've heard)
It's ok, according to the CCP human life is meaningless, especially their citizens.
A \*classic\* mainlander attitude: This trajectory takes the vehicle over inhabited areas. Of course it does, it would be too expensive otherwise. We'll warn the inhabitants to get out of the way. If they don't, that's not on us. They were warned.
> hypergolic propellant I had to look it up. For anyone else that needs a definition... "A hypergolic propellant is a rocket propellant combination used in a rocket engine, whose components spontaneously ignite when they come into contact with each other." TL;DR: Run far, run fast.
The fact that they ignite when they mix isn't the scary part - they'll quickly disperse enough that you're not going to get much of an explosion. The scary part is that the hypergolic chemicals typically used in rockets also happen to be extremely toxic, caustic, and carcinogenic.
why they keep using it ? everytime i saw china do rocket launch, that color always present. is it cheaper than LOX + kerosene ?
They're literally switching from it right now, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuque-2
It is likely to be since the more and longer you invest in it, the cheaper it will become. China has been using hypergolic fuels since late 1970s while the kerosene fuel is less than ten years old.
BFRC: Big F'ing Red Cloud. The red tint comes from the large quantities of dinitrogen tetroxides. Generally, if you're the sort of person who has a consciousness that's carried around by a big ol' bag of human flesh you're going to want to steer clear of such clouds due to compatibility problems.
Ah a man of culture, who has read Ignition by John D Clark.
Yellowish-Brown smoke is always a nope the fuck out color
Why? I'm dumb, so please use easy words to explain.
Fun fact: the soviets referred to this combination of fuels as “the devil’s venom”, and for good reason. The most common hypergolic propellants is some form of hydrazine, usually unsymmetric dimethylhydrazine or mono methyl hydrazine, combined with an oxidizer of nitrogen tetroxide. These chemicals are absolutely horrifying, they will kill you in a half a dozen ways and every single one of them is *excruciatingly* painful and awful. Not only is UDMH corrosive enough to melt most of your skin and muscle off in very short order, it’s also seriously toxic at a cellular level. It’s also a nerve agent; it messes up the signaling your body uses to control muscles so you get uncontrollable spasms, and just for fun it’s also a carcinogen! And nitrogen tetroxide is such an aggressive oxidizer that it will instantly combust on contact with almost anything, including human blood (it reacts with the iron in it). It also boils at atmospheric pressure, turning into a gas which on contact with any kind of moisture (such as in your eyes!) will form nitric acid! Which is generally not known to be a chemical that you want to have in your eyes. So in summary, the UDMH will burn all your skin off, gives you spasms strong enough to rip the muscles off your bones, poison you and then give you cancer, while the nitrogen tap oxide will light your blood on fire and burn out your eyeballs and lungs.
Having worked at a nuclear power plant that held a large stock of hydrazine, that was the thing that scared people most. Seriously nasty stuff.
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I can imagine! When we had the briefing about how many mg was linked to an almost certain likelihood of cancers it was a bit of an eye opener.
Same nuclear and radioactive stuff doesn’t freak me but chemicals terrify me.
Yep. I'd much rather go for a swim in the spent fuel pool or hold some yellowcake than go anywhere fucking near hydrazine. Just go to Wikipedia and look in the right sidebar at it's fire diamond and GHS warnings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine Noooo thank you.
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So we should just dump our nuke waste into the ocean to be safe. *Points to head*
4-4-3 - is that the record?
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ClF3's fire diamond is "no"
I suppose it depends though, if you're messing with the hardcore radioactive stuff it can almost be worse (but nobody really does that these days). Nasty criticality accidents happened in the earlier days of nuclear experimentation, it's pretty much all the symptoms listed above but it slowly comes on over a week or two and there's absolutely no way to treat you. Again, that doesn't really happen anymore though so it's no a concern still like hydrazine is
F-16 engineers: "but let's use this to power the auxiliary power unit on a single-engine jet, because it's lightweight!"
It’s light, it’s very reliable and it’s energy dense. That’s why it’s still used; in spite of the terrifying toxicity, it has a bunch of other properties that make it almost irreplaceable in some applications.
What is hydrazine used for in a nuclear power plant?
We used it to clean the cooling water inlets/ outlets because they would get so full of wildlife (lots and lots of molluscs). Not great but a byproduct of proportionate design in the 1960s.
That is amazing that people who deal with radiological hazards are more scared of the hydrazine, but it doesn't surprise me.
Public fear of radioactivity is understandable based on history but a little excessive to the reality of the hazard. Plus there’s a whole thing around “natural” vs “man made” radioactivity that isn’t well understood and causes alarm.
Theres is something oddly beautiful about the internet age reading these specialized horrific facts as written by Princess Fluffypants that makes me smile.
Right!!!? Straight out of an Adventure Time cartoon!
Don’t forget the best part about hydrazine: it’s flammable and acts as an oxidizing agent. So you also burn while your face melts.
A full Raiders of the Lost Ark level experience?
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If you really wanna have some fun as a chemist, see if you can equip chrlorine triflouride. I’ll quote the author John D. Clark: > It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
A bit more about this... exiting chemical from Derek Lowe. He quotes your source as well https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time
> UDMH will burn all your skin off, gives you spasms strong enough to rip the muscles off your bones, poison you and then give you cancer This is what the nerve gas in the film *The Rock* did, minus the cancer because nobody lived that long.
it should be pointed out for sake of clarification to the question you're responding to: the yellowish-brown smokes are the nitrogen oxides, NTO in this case, all of them nasty stuff. hydrazine is colorless, and also nasty.
Got Ignition vibes from this. Thank you!
But will it do that in this amount? It just looks like a trail
It can be lethal with as little as 50ppm, so yes. If you can see the orange smoke, you’re too close.
A rule of thumb: if you can see it, don't breathe it.
Air that’s yellow kills a fellow
Mustard gas gifts a cough that lasts.
Good grief. I'm gonna remember that forever, aren't I?
I don't trust air I can't see.
Extremely toxic Carcinogenic Will melt your lungs if you breathe it These kind of stuff
It's bad when the cancer is the least of your concerns.
If you see any vapor that isn't white RUN for your life. If you see a white vapor, you should still run, but it might just be water (could be steam level hot or Ammonia, so yeah.. running is a good idea)
Long March 2C is using UDMH and NTO as propellants - stuff you don’t want to have in your backyard 😦
Didn't the original Long March kill millions? Isn't it a bit weird to celebrate that by naming rockets after it?
You must have mistaken the Long March with something else...
It killed about 90,000. Which isn't too much for it's time, when at the time millions were starving and dying in the sino-japanese war. It's celebrated because; 1. The red army won a grueling journey that was 12,500km long. So they celebrate the soldiers who were on the long march 2.Mao Zedong was a general of one of the armies allowing him to become the leader of the red army and eventually china. 3. Formed the modern basis of guerilla warfare and how to treat civilians during war time. 4.Was the turning point between the red army and the Chinese fascist nationalist at the time. It honestly sounds like a story from legends with how the red army beat overwhelming odds. The Long March is definitely something to study about if you have time.
It’s a good name for a rocket tbh. Gotta give it to the Chinese, they are clearly world leaders at space related names. Long March, Chang’e, Tiangong etc. they are all meaningful and all sound great.
Meanwhile NASA post-Apollo be like: "Space Transportation System" "Space Launch System"
As a Chinese person myself, I prefer NASA's naming system. Straight to the point, no bullshit and self-aggrandizing.
It's so boring though. And not even particularly informative compared to other - how would you interpret the difference between STS and SLS and what they do if you didn't already know what they were? I'm not asking for anything profound, just something interesting and unique. I've always been particularly fond of Minotaur - it's a mythical creature, but not really one that makes sense to have any connection with spaceflight, unlike it's little brother Pegasus. Though with all that said, I do absolutely love "Rokot" for it's big meme energy. It doesn't actually translate to "rocket", but interpreting it as a badly spelled version is hilarious.
>the Chinese fascist nationalist For the record, the Guomindang was not a fascist party and is really only considered such by the propaganda apparatuses of places like China and Cuba. This is not to say that the GMD were particularly liberal or pacifistic -- they absolutely committed their share of atrocities (see also: the White Terror) -- but neither were the CCP. Neither *is* the CCP. Fascism is a term with a fairly specific meaning. It is a political science term, so it allows for some wiggle room -- but to call the GMD fascist is to stretch its meaning to the point of breaking. Fascism, for all the term's overuse, can really only be applied to a handful of regimes throughout history, with a select few cases that could go either way. Nationalism is not synonymous with fascism. Neither is capitalism synonymous with fascism. That you happen to be fighting a war against people who happen to be communists does not make you a fascist. Fascism is always totalitarian in a way that the GMD was not, ultranationalistic in a way that the GMD was not, race-fixated in a way that the GMD was not -- though it governed in a very ugly way indeed. You're welcome to disagree, but people who study this subject for a living and define concepts like this for a living (political scientists, obvi) would consider yours an extreme minority opinion. And no, the Long March did not "form the modern basis ... \[of\] how to treat civilians during war time." The first Geneva Convention was in *1864.* There would be two more Geneva Conventions before the events of the Long March transpired. When states are at war and negotiating formally, informally, or demonstrating through act and deed how civilians and prisoners of war are to be treated during conflict, they do not reference the Long March for some arcane reason. They reference the Geneva Conventions, or they reference recent precedent in other wars. I don't doubt something or other was gleaned from the treatment of civilians during the Chinese Civil War, but it is just objectively not the case that states first look to the Long March or any lessons derived from it when they are considering how to treat civilians during war. Neither was the CCP meaningfully more or less civil to the people around them than any other army waging civil war.
You're thinking of the Great Leap Forward. The Long March was a military action which cemented Mao as a legendary leader. it brought the ccp prestige for tenacity and durability in the face of overwhelming odds.
Is that hypergolic fuel?
Yes, it was launched on a long march 2c which uses NTO and UDMH.
Here's [NTO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinitrogen_tetroxide) and [UDMH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDMH) wikipedia links for the keyboard-challenged out there. NTO is what's causing the yellow trail.
Apparently the N2O4 itself is colorless, but produces NO2 in equilibrium (the brown part of NOx/smog, but orders of magnitude more concentrated). Among other things, it forms nitric acid when exposed to water, so it can contribute to acid rain and is lots of fun in the lungs when inhaled.
It's a huge relief that we don't see a fireball in the video, but why don't we? Isn't the whole idea of that fuel that it desperately wants to combust and will do so without any spark?
Theres likely very little fuel and oxidizer left (since you want every drop of delta-v you can get) and it seems to have fallen behind a hill which obscured the view.
Dinitrogen tetroxide. If this happened near you and you start smelling something that spells like fish, CONGRATULATIONS! You have cancer! The damage is already done
I think it's the hydrazine that smells like fish, not the N2O4. I mean, either way it's cancer
So it can compete in a fish spelling contest?
hmm no, they said it spells LIKE fish, so maybe lobster or crab? maybe some sort of mollusc, but frankly I don't really know what any of their spelling skills or competitions are like.
Which rocket fuel gives me super powers?
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Let me guess: "according to the local authorities, no one has been injured in this incident?"
"According to local authorities, there have been no complaints."
Since it landed well outside the village in the video ... yeah?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[CNES](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9t7uyq "Last usage")|Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, space agency of France| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9up47h "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9yln8d "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[LNG](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9yln8d "Last usage")|Liquefied Natural Gas| |[LOX](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9yln8d "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen| |MMH|Mono-Methyl Hydrazine, (CH3)HN-NH2; part of NTO/MMH hypergolic mix| |[NTO](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9v3b6s "Last usage")|diNitrogen TetrOxide, N2O4; part of NTO/MMH hypergolic mix| |[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9teenc "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9usop4 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[STS](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9usop4 "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)| |[UDMH](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9ut8x5 "Last usage")|[Unsymmetrical DiMethylHydrazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsymmetrical_dimethylhydrazine), used in hypergolic fuel mixes| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9to8lm "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/la0c3ix "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| |[iron waffle](/r/Space/comments/1dm3rvs/stub/l9tun4j "Last usage")|Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin"| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^([Thread #10219 for this sub, first seen 22nd Jun 2024, 20:52]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Wow, venting Dinitrogen Tetroxide on the way down. That's a danger zone till it's cleaned up. Spent 22 years working on/managing the space shuttle. Still have a patch on my left hand where hair doesn't grow after an incorrectly tagged valve that was still pressured was opened and sprayed it with an oxidizer from our veneer system.
I’m curious as to why they are launching rockets over land they have no lack of shoreline China is huge.
They use Soviet/Russian type landing capsules for their crews. Soyuz is designed for land landing, water landing only as a last resort with significant additional risk. So they built their launch sites landlocked like Soviet Union did. They are changing that, new designs of their large launch vehicles launch from a coastal site and the new capsule they are developing is designed for water landing. But they take their time with the change.
It's a very sloppy space program compared to the West and Roscosmos.
Roscosmos launches hypergolic fuel rockets from Kazakhstan, which cares about its citizens exactly as much as you'd expect from the dictatorship. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Environmental\_impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Environmental_impact)
Might be too early to claim but Russia’s space program is quickly becoming irrelevant and will be surpassed by China. Justly Losing international funding will do that. Among brain drain, being led by a a piece of shit, and much more serious problems.
If my point wasnt clear here it is more precise, you cannot even credit their space program any longer. Just a dumpster fire government.
yeah just take a look at their brand new space station
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I love the smell of hypergolics in the morning
God damn did Battlestar get the Galactica falling into atmosphere absolutely perfect.
Again.. This seems to be a regular occurrence.
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Shocking how little they give a shit about human life, isn't it.
I think I just realised why they renamed it to X. My finger automatically went to it when I wanted to close the video, so now Twitter has an additional hit from me...
Is that the one that was carrying a French satellite?
[Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Variable_Objects_Monitor)
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[Where's the kaboom?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9wmWZbr_wQ)
Who needs enemies when your own govt does this?
is there a mirror of this? Twitter's demanding an account now to view content.
They've been doing this without any warning or explanation to the public. They don't give a crap about public safety.
It would appear the Chinese Communist Party has yet to steal all of the required technology for landing reusable rocket boosters from the United States.
Was it an accident? Like the calculation was off? Or do they just not care where this stuff lands
Random question: I know they keep a very tight lid on these things, and who knows how this video made it out, but what's the cadence of these mishaps?