Old(?) Mishap At NASA: Hypergolic Propellant Fire
- Thread starter Winston
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It's amazing to see the guys in the fire suits dumping buckets of water on that thing to put it out... I would have just gotten the hell out of there. Hypergolic fuels are nasty...
It was uploaded to YouTube in January of 2018 but the write up doesn't provide much information. There does seem to be some sort of time stamp running on the bottom of the video if you knew how to translate it there might be a real date in there someplace.
BA_Incognito
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Those aren't fire suits, those are Level A HazMat suits. They have no fire protective qualities at all. That could have gotten bad real quick.
What's amazing is that there was no fire protocol in place better than "Should we release freon?" "No, just throw a bucket of water on it." To answer the question in the post title: yes, this has to be old. Ancient by space age standards. No modern safety officer would allow so dangerous an operation to be conducted so ill prepared. Heck, no club launch RSO would allow it. This has to be before Apollo 1.
Winston
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I was trying to figure out what they might have been fueling based upon the hardware poorly seen in the background, but that got me nowhere. However, I believe I've found an approximate era based upon the suits worn. A perfect match is seen here:
1966 NASA suits seen here, specifically starting at 12:23. Much different:
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