Ensuring the Safety of Launch and Propellant Systems
Launch Vehicle & Missile Propellant Safety
Developing the data to establish the safety standards for the Liquid Natural Gas and Liquid Oxygen propelled launch vehicles
Working to understand the nature of propellant explosions to learn how to protect the crew on board and the ground team supporting the launches
Building LNG and LOX propellant handling systems
Understanding propellant explosions:
Blast physics: overpressures, total pressures, accelerations and spectrum content, total impulses
Fragments: generations and accelerations, debris fields and near field kinetic energies to enable teams to design to protect form them or prevent them
Fireballs: durations, temperatures, heat fluxes, and sizes
Major test programs: gaseous test efforts up to 16 foot diameter balloons to produce weakly contained gas explosions which provided the ability to estimate peak overpressures, now performing large scale cryogenic explosions and future hydrogen gas explosions planned