Another Chinese rocket falls near a school, creating toxic orange cloud

China numba waun!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/another-chinese-rocket-falls-near-a-school-creating-toxic-orange-cloud/

On Monday, a Long March 4B rocket launched from China's Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center carrying a remote-sensing satellite. This 50-year-old spaceport is located in north-central China, about 500km to the southwest of Beijing.


As often happens with the first stages of Chinese rockets launching from the inland Taiyuan facility, the spent Long March 4B booster fell downstream of the spaceport. In this case, it landed near a school, creating a predictably large cloud of toxic gas.


Unlike most of the world's spaceports, several of China's launch sites are located at inland locations rather than near water to avoid such hazards. For security purposes, China built three of its major launch centers away from water during the Cold War, amid tensions with both America and the Soviet Union.


In recent years China has begun to experiment with grid fins to steer its rockets back to Earth—and eventually to potentially land boosters like SpaceX does with its Falcon 9 rocket. However this project seems driven more by a desire to master reuse technology than to protect its population, as China has been launching from Taiyuan since 1968 with seemingly little regard for nearby residents.


Compounding the problem of dropping rocket first stages on the surrounding countryside is that China continues to use toxic hydrazine fuel for its first stages. Hydrazine, which is two nitrogens bound together by hydrogen atoms, is an efficient, storable fuel. But it is also highly corrosive and toxic.


When a Crew Dragon spacecraft exploded during a test in April 2019, it produced large clouds of toxic orange gas that could be seen for miles around on Florida beaches. These reddish clouds were caused by nitrogen tetroxide, the oxidizer that combusts with hydrazine fuel. This spacecraft—and many others in the past, including the space shuttle—used storable propellants for in-space operations. NASA has been working to find "green" propellants that would obviate the need to use hydrazine for even in-space operations.


It is a different story for rockets, however. The use of hydrazine as a fuel for launch vehicles has been phased out for most of the world. The last major US rocket to use hydrazine was United Launch Alliance's Delta II rocket, which used the toxic fuel in its second stage. This rocket was retired in 2018. Russia's workhorse Proton rocket uses hydrazine for its first and second stages.


Yet the majority of China's launch fleet is powered by hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. This includes its human-rated Long March 2F rocket as well as the widely used Long March 4 family. All of these rockets, with their toxic first stages, launch over land and have caused numerous incidents over the years. These fuels are cheap and relatively easy to use, and it would have been natural for China to use them in the 1980s and 1990s when these boosters were developed. But their use continues unabated today.


China is slowly changing. Its new family of large rockets, the Long March 5 fleet, is fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene, like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Paradoxically, however, the Long March 5 rockets typically launch from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site—over the ocean.

 

[Y2K Baby]

Orange cloud bad.

 

[heathercho]

China is slowly changing.

No they're not.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

No they're not.

Their changing from starving peasants and dedicated ideological soldiers to yellow heebs and fat neets

 

[TFT-A9]

Best news I've heard all day

 

[SIGSEGV]

Impressive.

With this most recent achievement, fate has in a single stroke, marked the decline of the west and spelled a new era of wondrous prosperity and peaceful global dominance for the Chinese dragon, which promises to firmly stand in sharp contrast to the historically bloody ascent of western powers and the cruel subjugation it brought to the humbler nations of the world. With the blessings of Chinese quantum direct-current electricity, quantum aircraft carriers and quantum enhanced railguns will be the instruments with which China affirms its noble stewardship of 21st century world politics and offers the non-western world a different option; an humanist alternative to the depredations of Western leadership and the opportunity for a more equitable and dignified multilateralism.

 

[The Dude]

I have a sneaky feeling the CCP really doesn't give a shit about the hazards and loss of human life. They're probably more upset about the loss of the payload.

 

[The handsome tard]

CNN will blame it on trump for the simple fact it was orange. Just watch it.

 

[Made In China]

Orange is a trigger word now

 

[Marissa Moira]

This is stealth marketing for resident evil 8.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

What, we're just going to ignore the "another"?

 

[GarthVader]

Xin Sheng!

 

[Dick Justice]

Ok but how can a fuel be well "storable" and also highly corrosive? Did they switch all the spaceships to rubber while I wasn't looking?

E: Serious question

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

> World Super Power
> Can't launch a rocket without unleashing toxic fumes on school children

 

[The handsome tard]

> World Super Power
> Can't launch a rocket without unleashing toxic fumes on school children

Its not a failure if you dont care about the victims *tap forehead*

 

[Creep3r]

No need to be worried dear people of our most glorious communist Republic. Its just our most honorable president testing the effectiveness of his air-enhancing honey bomb!

 

[The Dude]

Ok but how can a fuel be well "storable" and also highly corrosive? Did they switch all the spaceships to rubber while I wasn't looking?

E: Serious question

They have corrosion resistant coatings that they line the storage tanks with and keep the fuel in the tanks until it's time to fuel the rocket. Older ICBMs like the Soviet R-7 and American Titan I had to keep the fuel stored separately from the missile until it was time for launch, which made them unacceptable as a retaliatory strike weapon. Especially the R-7 which took twenty hours to fuel and prep for launch. Most rockets these days are either solid fuel or have updated liquid fuels that can be stored on the missile so they're ready for an immediate launch. And a lot of our rockets for space launches trace their lineage back to ICBM developments.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

That orange stuff usually is hypergolic fuel, which is indeed insanely toxic and carcinogenic.
Btw, it's what KSP calls "monopropellant"

 

[Red Hood]

I mean if they wanted quality rockets they'd have used a brand that wasn't made in China.

 

[BScCollateral]

Ok but how can a fuel be well "storable" and also highly corrosive? Did they switch all the spaceships to rubber while I wasn't looking?

E: Serious question

The first rocket fuels (ethanol and kerosene) used liquid oxygen as an oxidizer. Liquid oxygen is very cold, and needs to be kept at a very low temperature to prevent it from boiling. Since the rocket can't carry a lot of insulation, the liquid oxygen needs to be pumped into the rocket before launching. This could take hours, which is fine for a space launcher but terrible for a nuclear armed missile.

The next generation of fuel was hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide (more or less; different rockets used different formulations), which are both liquid at normal temperatures and are not severely corrosive. Because of this, the Titan II ICBM could be stored fuelled and ready to launch within 1-3 minutes of the order.

They wanted to use Satan's urine instead, but that just isn't toxic enough. More seriously, while these are incredibly dangerous chemicals and people who work with it wear what look like space suits, they are stable at room temperature and can be stored in the missile; thus, "storable."

TL;DR: Hypergolics are called "storable" because they are more easy to store than cryonic oxidizers. They are, however, incredibly dangerous, and are the cause of the most serious rocket-related incidents.

The good news is that a replacement for these fuels is being developed and the initial experiments seem promising.