• 1 Post
  • 65 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2023

help-circle









  • The issue with isopropanol peroxide formation is that exposing it to air – even when just using it, like when you’re cleaning parts – starts the process. The air in the head space of your containers is also enough to form them over time. You don’t necessarily need to see solids in the containers for it to be dangerous, since they’ll crystallize out as you concentrate the solution during distillation.

    It’s also a numbers game. It probably won’t explode the first time you do it. But there’s a chance each time. Do it enough, and you’ll have an incident.

    There are chemical reductants that can clear peroxides. For industrial scale isopropanol distillation, I’m not sure what they use. It may be that they just never distill down to the point that peroxides concentrate to a dangerous level.



  • No no no no no.

    I’m a chemist. Organic chemistry PhD, now a process chemist in the industry. I do this for a living. Do not distill isopropanol that’s been exposed to air for any meaningful length of time.

    Isopropanol slowly reacts with oxygen in the air to generate peroxides that, when you concentrate them down, EXPLODE. Source. Sorry, not an open access journal. But please take my word for it.

    Unless you have a way of confirming the peroxide levels in your isopropanol are near zero, do not concentrate it down by distillation. You’ll blow up your glassware, which will probably expose what you’re distilling to your heat source, which will generate a secondary fireball.

    PLEASE do not do this.








  • A lot of the Apollo work also got done in basically one administration (Johnson largely continued JFK’s policies). As soon as Nixon was in charge, NASA got gutted, and then they only had the resources for shuttle. Later Apollo missions got cancelled because Nixon thought the money was better spent killing more Vietnamese people.

    Switching administrations means vastly changing policies, if for no other reason than the new boss hates the old boss. SLS “succeeded” (got hardware made and launched, at least) where Constellation failed partly because they buttered everyone’s bread in the right way.

    HLS is dumb. SLS is dumb. But similarly to Commercial Cargo and Crew, it survived administration changes partly because NASA wasn’t directly at the helm, so the new guys didn’t just hit the big red stop button.


  • In the entire history of NASA, they’ve never manufactured any boosters for themselves. Redstone was from the army. Titan, also military. Saturn I and V were designed by NASA but contracted to big aircraft manufacturers as contractors. Shuttle was Boeing / Rockwell for the orbiter, ATK for the boosters. SLS is basically all the Shuttle contractors, again. (That was the point.)

    I hear what you’re saying. But NASA would need to spin up an entire company from scratch to build their own rockets. That’s not what their mandate is, and it’s not what they’re good at.