Picking up glowing hot space shuttle tiles with bare hands (2011) [video]
kottke.org
kottke.org
I read the whole thing every time it shows up in my inbox. I love that you guys have so many links embedded in each newsletter. There are insane amount resources I didn’t know existed. I love space and you guys are doing a great job bringing my childhood curiosity back. Again, thanks!
Came to find out just a few years ago that my aunt, who is retired from NSA/CIA/Rand, was one of the people who translated the Soviet shuttle plans and helped discover that they were stolen from the USA. Apparently she was also involved, somehow, in every stealth program up until she retired. Exactly what she did...don't know, and she wouldn't elaborate.
Later I saw black and white video of the same classroom, the thermite set the projector screen on fire ( which for some dumb reason was down at the time), the instructor panicked and pulled the screen causing it to retracted.
This did not put out the fire.
Unfortunately the video cuts out there. The building did not burn down, apparently, but I would have liked to have seen the full saga.
I almost skipped chemistry class the day they did the thermite demo for us. Instead I sat way in the back.
In regular materials, the heat flows quickly from the center, so the temperature of the outer layer cannot drop significantly in such a short amount of time.
But this material conducts heat so poorly that this doesn't happen, so the outer layer stays cool.
This makes sense - the tiles themselves are at 2200 degrees but are not transmitting the heat quickly to you while you touch them for a brief period of time.
So the corners of the tiles become cool within a few seconds, even though the material inside just a centimeter away is at thousands of degrees.
That's why he said to touch the corners. And why you can see the corners not glowing, while the center of the sides keeps glowing.
Similar to being in a sauna. A human can stand inside a 150F sauna without getting burned (the air doesn't hold much heat and slowly transfers it to your body). But if had 150F water against your skin, you'd be burned quite quickly.
We included fragments of a flown Shuttle tile in our Fourth Edition collection. The material is crazy difficult to work with. It powders under pressure. You obviously can't use a hot wire to cut it either (ha, ha).
The regular house insulation already works pretty well, and heating is not incredibly expensive. Aerogel would have to come way down in price for it to make economic sense.
LI-900 is 144.2 kg/m³ (9 lb/ft³) and silica aerogel goes around 1,900 g/m3
So it's not the same thing at all, even though it's made from the same raw material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoCAxS4vqwQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAgel
>SEAgel (Safe Emulsion Agar gel) is one of a class of high-tech foam materials known as aerogels. It is an excellent thermal insulator and among the least dense solids known. SEAgel was invented by Robert Morrison at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1992. SEAgel is made of agar, a carbohydrate material that comes from kelp and red algae, and has a density of 200 mg/cm3. SEAgel can be made lighter than air using hydrogen, causing it to float or hang in the air. It insulates against temperature, noise, and electric current. SEAgel is also completely biodegradable, as it is made entirely of biological material and can even be eaten.
http://www.buyaerogel.com/product/aeroeggs/
>Aeroeggs from Aerogelex are unique aerogels made from hard-boiled eggs. While many people think of space-age blue holographic solids made of silica when they hear the word aerogel, aerogels can actually be made from a wide variety of substances including biopolymers such as those found in eggs. Aeroeggs are made through supercritical drying, the same process used to make other aerogels, just using boiled eggs instead of silica or polymer gel precursors. Boiling an egg causes the proteins in the egg to denature and link together to form a gel matrix that contains water in its pores. Once the inside of the egg has congealed, the shell is removed and the boiled egg inside is soaked in ethanol to replace the water in its pores with a non-polar solvent that is compatible with supercritical drying. After soaking the egg is put in a high-pressure vessel and the ethanol in its pores is extracted with supercritical carbon dioxide to make an egg aerogel.
>Aeroeggs are made from ordinary chicken eggs but are about half the size of a typical hard boiled egg due to contraction of the egg protein network when the water in the egg is replaced with ethanol and carbon dioxide. Density is approximately 0.6 g/cc making Aeroeggs approximately 50% air by volume. Aeroeggs absorb 3x their weight in water to irreversibly rehydrate back into regular hard boiled eggs.
As another commenter noted the shuttle tiles are not made of aerogel but they are indeed silica based.
You could probably set something on fire, but not just anything.
The material is fine, this demonstration is hilariously bad. This demonstration could be done with a block of wood. Take a blow torch to a block of wood that size and pretty much the same result.
TOUCH THE SIDES!
TOUCH THE SIDES!
TOUCH THE SIDES!
This is nitpicking but it seems odd to use a negative value adjective like "poorly" as if high thermal conductivity would then be "excellent", instead of just saying something neutral like "low heat conductivity". I don't know, it just struck me as odd.