For those not following the story, this is an attempt to launch a massive rocket without adequate cooling or shockwave mitigation, so it’s likely to cause substantial harm to the local ecosystem and the small community of retirees who live near the launch site.
On the one hand. This is going to be a disaster of N1 proportions, especially to the environment. Even in the increasingly unlikely event that it clears the pad instead of topping the Wikipedia list of biggest artificial non-nuclear explosions.
On the other, cool explosions and we’ll get a WTYP episode out of it, so who’s to say what’s good or bad here?
Big bada boom
This is true, however the propellants are liquid oxygen and methane so they would just boil off
I’d have a look at the article that UlyssesT’s post linked to. My concern is not that the rocket blows up, it’s that they discover they need a flame trench by barbecuing a bunch of shorebirds and their ecologically sensitive habitat in the name of challenging conventions. Even though it’s just a test, the energies involved here are going to be huge and the engineers don’t seem to give much more of a plover’s ass about the area where they’re conducting the test than King Bazinga himself.
I remember a post-fall History Channel show doing Yellow Panic about China’s space program accidentally dropping a space shuttle segment on a nearby village. Watch the upcoming disaster in Florida get almost no coverage.
