Spacecraft Fire Experiment I

[ourmandave]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1761.html

[anateus]

I had to google around to find this out, but looks like this will be performed in the Cygnus craft that results from Orbital ATK's flight Cygnus CRS OA-6 which is expected to launch on March 22 (PDT, it's the 23rd UTC).

[CarolineW]

More discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11296795

[gulpahum]

There is a Galactica '78 episode about a massive fire in space :) . It isn't scientifically accurate, though.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0519742/

[SeanDav]

I would have thought that this could be modelled accurately in computer simulations and tested in far smaller scale.

[wheaties → SeanDav]

Models are only as good as the assumptions that underpin them. Real life tends to do surprising things.

[Retric → SeanDav]

Fire is really hard to model accurately.

PS: It also looks cool, so IMO people would be messing with it even if they could model it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zdD7lfB0Fs

[danielvf]

Tdlr:

No One has ever tested how fires bigger than matches behave in space.

Since it would be stupid to make a big fire in the space station, the inside of a cargo spaceship will be rigged with a dozen materials to light on fire before the cargo ship burns up entering the atmosphere.

[subinsebastien → danielvf]

Actually, a rectangular card of significant size inside the experiment module will only be set on fire, not the entire cargo. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experimen...

[mirimir → danielvf]

Well: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5978305/fighting-a-fire-aboard-the-mi...