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Starlite

en.wikipedia.org

99 points9woc39 comments

This material sounds like a hoax reminiscent of the Sloot Digital Coding System[0], another supposedly groundbreaking "lost invention".

An amateur chemist is unlikely to be able to invent such a material. It's also odd to keep the recipe a closely guarded secret instead of patenting and selling it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

My read of it, given the later moderately successful replication attempts, is that it's probably mostly real, but also actually just significantly less impressive than it sounds. Most organic materials turn into some form of carbon or ceramic when heated, at which point heat resistance on its own isn't that big of a deal.

Yeah, there are several classified materials that are nonetheless believed to exist and even function as advertised, like FOGBANK [1]. Starlite might be a similar case, given current knowledges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

The story of this material is hilarious... Legacy y12 workers were told not to talk to anyone about the process or write anything down, many didn't even understand how the process worked as a whole, eventually enough workers aged out of their jobs and the manufacturing process stopped working and no one could trouble shoot it effectively.

It also might not be better than existing options. Military and aerospace probably want something sturdier, more aerodynamic, and more predictable, while for civilian applications I'm having a hard time thinking of any occasions where you'd want extremely capable but single use heat shielding.

A coating for projectiles to be able to withstand the heat from laser weapons would be one with possibly significant impact, given recent announcements.

To my understanding, intumescent paint is great to paint on structural elements of buildings. E.g. a skyscraper's steel frame.

Whilst true it seems like the AWRE and Ministry of Defence thought it was credible.

I can also completely forgive anyone in the 1980s for being led down the spooky national-defence paranoia route, regarding their invention. It was a different time where people were more deferential to the authorities, and had more of a reason to want their protection. You just need one visit from the men in grey coats asking nicely for a cup of tea, your formula, and your signature on the official secrets act. The effects compounded if you were prone to the Walter Mitty effect.

Anything crucial enough to maintaining an edge in the Cold War — or rather, ensuring survival should it become a hot war, something for which magical ablative insulation would be very handy — isn’t the sort of thing that gets a patent. One simply doesn’t win by suing the USSR for intellectual property infringement in the dying ashes of civilisation, old boy.

A lecturer of mine published a paper on bivalve adhesion that was allegedly funded by government interests desperate to maintain a strategic lead in limpet mines. Another worked with ultra high speed equipment with an electronic shutter that was switched by a krytron, the same component used in nuclear device detonation. There was a potent, possibly overblown concern about labs being infiltrated or broken into.

I think we forget about the miserable amount of paranoia brought about by the world being permanently only four minutes away from ending, and the weird things it made people do.

For those who haven't heard of it, the actual law governing this is the Ivention Secrecy Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act

usa law does not have jurisdiction in hartlepool yet, so this is sort of irrelevant, but presumably the uk has something similar

Section 22 of the Patents Act 1977 is, as far as I can tell, the analogous legislation [0].

[0] - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-patent-act-1977/section-22-s...

Some would say not even English law has much authority in Hartlepool:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger

The US is the only one who [be it long ago] publised a list of topics subject to review and a number every year. Total Secrecy Orders in Effect at the end of 2023 was 6155

https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/invention/stats.html

Safe to assume other countries combined add more thousands.

I see room for a much greater than zero chance we live in a science fiction story with carefully chosen toys for the irresponsible masses. (that would be us, haha)

They have like cloaking fields, a garage full of flying cars, a crate of mister fusions, hand held teleportation devices, sentient holograms, a hypno ray to rc people like toy cars and an interstellar phone to talk with our alien overlords.

i never seem to finish all my food

i always get a fnord doggie bag

from the waiter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urglg3WimHA

Also, if samples were really given out for testing, I find it incredulous nobody stole a small bit they could throw into a mass spectrometer.

My understanding is that for a simple mix of elements, that might be helpful. But it’s not a matter decompiler. For more complex material, it’ll point you in a direction, not give you a recipe.

Totally, but you could get a pretty big starting point vs knowing nothing. Especially if it is composed of organic compounds, you have a chance of deciphering some of the molecules.

My big hedge - I am not sure the specs of a 40 year old MS. Unit resolution is probably the best case scenario along with super limited m/z range. Interrogating a sample would be much harder than today.

"Yup, that's mass!"

It’s definitely not not mass…

Have we considered the possibility that it might be energy? I heard sometimes you might think something is mass but actually it's energy.

It’s energy turtles all the way down.

ward was super paranoid about this; if i recall correctly, part of the testing protocol when he let companies test it was that everyone involved in the testing had to wash their hands when they left to ensure they didn't have any under their fingernails. but i might be misremembering

Washing your hands doesn't actually clean whatever is under your fingernails.

he was a hairdresser, not a forensic pathologist

I suggest the two videos by NightHawkInLight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqR4_UoBIzY

Thanks for this. On the updated video[0] there is an absolutely fascinating comment from a former McDonnell Douglas employee who worked with Maurice Ward and had first hand experience testing Starlite. Among other things, he states that it was actually a family of compounds formulated for specific applications and that "all that stuff about being a hairdresser was a red herring that [Maurice Ward] used to distract people from the fact that he'd spent years in the plastic recycling business," with polypropylene being incorporated into at least some Starlite formulations. Sounds like quite a character.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IbWampaEcM comment by grampsinsl5232

When you protect your supposedly world changing creation so much that you don't allow it to enter the world... May it serve as a cautionary tale.

It is a bit unfortunate that they took that approach. A patent would have seemingly been reasonable and it wouldn’t have died with them.

As discussed in another subthread, it may well be that the secret of the material is not lost, but is still, well, a secret. Of the "top secret" kind.

> NASA became involved in Starlite in 1994, and NASA engineer Rosendo 'Rudy' Naranjo[17] talked about its potential in a Dateline NBC report. The Dateline reporter stated that Starlite could perhaps help with the fragile Space Shuttle heat shield.[13] Naranjo said of their discussions with Ward, "We have done a lot of evaluation and … we know all the tremendous possibilities that this material has."

Presumably NASA and the inventor couldn't reach a deal over the decades? Or it wasn't as useful as claimed? But then why would a company have paid to acquire the tech in 2013?

Would there be advantages to a tensile biocomposite with Starlite and/or Firepaste e.g. as a coating or blended?

Can Starlite be used as heat shielding for [biocomposite] civilian rockets, and how would the reentry emissions differ?

You're aware that capsules commonly use cork as ablative heat shielding, right?

If you want to be better, you'd need something like the shuttle to get by without ablatives.

Cork is one layer of some heat shields (and a sustainable insulator)

This is how the industry failed and bought steel instead.

Guessing mach-whatever reentry speeds would strip it, shred it.

Good for hypersonic missiles reentering from staging in low Earth orbit.

That was my first thought. Probably don’t need this being reproduced if it is real.

I think it may lack the physical strength as ablative shield. Id have guessed at protection from laser weapons

If true that would surely invalidate basically all the energy based weapons being developed ?

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