Author Topic: UDMH/NTO, too toxic for commercial use, or paranoid kazakhs?  (Read 5089 times)

Offline quanthasaquality

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From the right launch site, would UDMH/NTO rockets be commercially feasible with only minor detrimental effects on human health?

The Soviet Union designed a bunch of UDMH/NTO rockets, including the Proton. I imagine a successful rocket launch will burn almost all the UDMH & NTO, into H2O, N2, and CO2, none of which are toxic. Now, rockets will ocassionally fail, and leak lots of UDMH and NTO.

In Baikonur, there have been protests over the use of UDMH/NTO in rockets. And, a couple of news stories found via Google

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/05/mysterious-deaths-of-saiga-antelopes-may-have-sinister-cause/

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/disease-fears-on-rockets-path/

Wouldn't a big ocean, or the large expanses of of low population Kazakhstan, be enough to dilute the amount of UDMH/NTO exposure to humans? Wouldn't the biology and sunlight break down the NTO and UDMH? The launch site doesn't have to be permanently populated with pregnant women and kids. Is the Kazakhstan environmental movement going to town? Have the Russians just disregarded safety?

Offline Damon Hill

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Well, it's expensive compared to kero/LOX.  It's expensive stuff to make, and corrosion and safety requirements make it more expensive to handle.  When things go sideways, it's just nasty, as in the Nedelin disaster and that wayward Chinese launch that took out a small town.

Despite that, hypergols have some good properties like room temperature dense liquids with decent Isp that autoignite.  By itself, hydrazine is a fairly good monopropellant.  So the stuff will likely continue to be used in satellites and spacecraft where the quantities aren't very large.  But even there,  new mostly non-toxic monopropellants are being developed with better Isp.  I think the real original driver was for largish ICBMs that didn't have to be tanked with LOX, and safety was a secondary concern.  These also made for good launch vehicles, so the legacy persisted even after liquid ICBMs were mostly retired.

We certainly won't see fluorine; it was seriously considered and everyone chickened out on that stuff.  There's toxic, and then there's crazy.

Most countries and programs are definitely moving away from using hypergols in launch vehicles, and towards cheaper LOX, RP-1 and now, methane, as well as hydrogen.  I think direct and indirect costs are the real driver, but safety is certainly a factor.

« Last Edit: 07/06/2015 07:37 am by Damon Hill »

Offline Prober

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Well, it's expensive compared to kero/LOX.  It's expensive stuff to make, and corrosion and safety requirements make it more expensive to handle.  When things go sideways, it's just nasty, as in the Nedelin disaster and that wayward Chinese launch that took out a small town.

Despite that, hypergols have some good properties like room temperature dense liquids with decent Isp that autoignite.  By itself, hydrazine is a fairly good monopropellant.  So the stuff will likely continue to be used in satellites and spacecraft where the quantities aren't very large.  But even there,  new mostly non-toxic monopropellants are being developed with better Isp.  I think the real original driver was for largish ICBMs that didn't have to be tanked with LOX, and safety was a secondary concern.  These also made for good launch vehicles, so the legacy persisted even after liquid ICBMs were mostly retired.

We certainly won't see fluorine; it was seriously considered and everyone chickened out on that stuff.  There's toxic, and then there's crazy.

Most countries and programs are definitely moving away from using hypergols in launch vehicles, and towards cheaper LOX, RP-1 and now, methane, as well as hydrogen.  I think direct and indirect costs are the real driver, but safety is certainly a factor.

this might be a direction?

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=33141.msg1397362#msg1397362
2017 - Everything Old is New Again.
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." --Isoroku Yamamoto

Offline edkyle99

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From the right launch site, would UDMH/NTO rockets be commercially feasible with only minor detrimental effects on human health?
Dozens of tonnes of storable propellants launch from U.S. soil every year.  That Dragon that crashed last week was full of hundreds of kg of NTO/MMH, for example.  So was the Cygnus that burned after its Antares blew up last Fall in Virginia.  CST-100 will use the propellant, and Orion will be loaded with tonnes of the stuff.  Most satellites use MMH, which remains on-orbit for decades in some cases.  ISS, of course, is refueled with storables by Progress.  Storables are used because they work, really well, in the long-term on-orbit application.

The problem with using it for launch vehicles, at least in the U.S., is cost.  There would be two costs.  The first would be the cost of developing a new set of booster and sustainer engines.  Aerojet's Titan engine production line is long-gone.  The second cost would be the environmental and human health cost, manifested primarily in the cost of safely handling the stuff, in clean-up and liability costs in the event of spills, and so on. 

Kerosene has its own environmental costs.  Just look at the Superfund status of the old Rocketdyne and Aerojet test stands, and of the old Titan test stands in Colorado, etc.  They used TCE to flush the engines, creating groundwater plumes.  Presumably they're not doing that at McGregor.

 - Ed Kyle
« Last Edit: 07/06/2015 02:47 pm by edkyle99 »

Offline notsorandom

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The propellants are not perfectly burned in the rocket engine too. There will be some residual unburned fuel and oxidizer.

Offline mikes

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UDMH is quite stable, so hangs around a long time, but eventually decomposes to nitrosodimethylamine and tetramethyltetrazene, which are both pretty nasty.

http://www.ipsnews.net/1998/10/environment-russia-spent-russian-rockets-leave-a-toxic-legacy/

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