[AR] Re: Damascus AR Incident
- From: Derek Lyons <fairwater@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2017 12:43:21 -0800
On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 12:18 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jan 2017, David Spain wrote:
1) Would it have been possible to have sent the PTS team to the lower
level in an attempt to patch shut the leak long enough to have pumped the
fuel out of the missile's first stage? Or would the pressure of the escaping
fuel been too high to patch the rupture by hand?
Also, patching the leak wouldn't have been easy. The hole was only about
half an inch across, but it was spewing a gallon of fuel every few seconds,
so the flow rate was sizable. I'd be very surprised if anybody had thought
enough about such a scenario to have even sorted out the materials and
techniques needed for a patch -- it wouldn't be simple.
On the boats it took a chunk of wood and some lead sheet and and a
modest amount of training to patch such a leak. But our basic method
of stopping a small, slow leak (driving a cone of wood wrapped in lead
sheet into the hole) wouldn't have worked well in the thin skin of a
missile. (It would have torn the skin and just made things worse.)
They'd have needed something like a toggle bolt that could pull a
patch against the skin - fairly trivial as such things go, and pretty
easily applied. (A gallon of fuel every few seconds would make a
messy amount of spray, but from a physical point of view provides no
significant amount of resistance.) But they would *also*, as Henry
points out, have needed to have suits that could withstand immersion
in the fuel (and allow physical exertion over a period of time, my
recollection is that their suits would do neither). Me, I'd rather
face a main seawater leak down at deep depth (which I have done in the
get-wet trainer) rather than eff about with hydrazine.
D.
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