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The toolkit of the average NASA engineer of the 1960’s contained standard equipment such as screwdrivers, pliers, welding torches, and even broomsticks. It turns out that these engineers weren’t helping out the janitorial staff, but were using the broomsticks to keep everyone safe from fuel leaks and dangerous explosions. All of this comes back to the most basic atom there is: Hydrogen.
In the 1930s, passenger airships were a popular, exciting way to see the world. On May 6th, 1937, a passenger airship called the Hindenburg was carrying 97 people from Frankfurt, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, in the US. Unfortunately, the airship caught fire and was fully ablaze within minutes, resulting in 36 deaths. Experts at the time, and in the decades since, have agreed that the fire most likely started when the airship’s hydrogen gas system developed a leak, and a wayward spark ignited the ball of flammable gas.
This disaster demonstrated two things that we know about hydrogen: it’s incredibly dangerous, and it has immense potential as a fuel source. Hydrogen atoms are small, making it difficult to prevent leaks. Even the tiniest spark can light up a cloud of hydrogen gas and cause a massive disaster in just seconds. Hydrogen gas is also colorless and odorless, which means that it’s extremely difficult to detect a gas leak.
Despite its dangers, the benefits of using hydrogen fuel are incredibly tempting. It’s clean and efficient, and produces much smaller amounts of carbon-based gasses than coal and natural gas. Hydrogen’s fuel byproducts can be prevented from entering the atmosphere more easily, and it can even be used in self-contained fuel cells, where the only byproduct left behind is water. Hydrogen is also lightweight and powerful, making it perfect for fueling rocketships.
Harnessing hydrogen fuel sources could be crucial in the fight against climate change, and we do use hydrogen fuel in a few places. However, it’s important to remember that hydrogen is incredibly dangerous, and can cause massive disasters if handled improperly. For more information and a free $20 credit, visit linode.com/scishow.
For decades, NASA has used liquid hydrogen to power its launches, and has gained a lot of experience managing the dangers of working with such an invisible fuel. To get the hydrogen from its storage tanks to the launchpad, it has to travel through miles of pipes, which can create a lot of opportunities for leaks.
In the 1960s and ’70s, when NASA was working on the Apollo missions, liquid hydrogen fuel was new and leaks were a constant fear due to the danger of a hydrogen fire. To hunt for these invisible flames, NASA employees would walk around holding broomsticks out in front of them; if the bristles touched an invisible hydrogen fire, they would burn visibly.
In 2003, researchers developed a chemochromic tape that changes color in response to the presence of hydrogen, making it a visual indicator to pinpoint the exact location of a leak. The tape was deployed in 2007 during the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-118 mission to the International Space Station and has been used on all following launches of the Endeavor. This technology has also been adapted for use in industrial environments, such as oil refineries and chemical plants.
NASA’s decades of research into making hydrogen fuel safer has made it possible to explore the upsides of hydrogen fuel, and we may never have been able to do so if not for all those employees wandering around with broomsticks. Developers trust Linode as their cloud computing company. With 24/7 award-winning customer support, guides, video tutorials, community and more, even novice techies can quickly get up to speed. They have been in the cloud computing business for almost two decades, offering services to both beginners and experts. As your needs grow, so does Linode - they will be there for you to depend on.
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