NASA Wants to See What Happens When You Start a Fire On the Moon – VICE

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NASA wants to start a fire under lunar gravity just to see what happens. And maybe learn a thing or two about putting out a space fire.
By Luis Prada
The brave Artemis II astronauts brought humanity back to the Moon’s general vicinity. Now that we’ve done that, we want to set the thing on fire to make sure no one else can go. Well, not really. But kind of.
NASA actually does want to start a fire under lunar gravity just to see what happens—maybe learn a thing or two about how to put out a space fire. It’s a wild-sounding experiment that is actually rather practical. It’s all about risk management.
After Artemis II proved we can still send humans into space, the next question is how to keep them alive once they get there. Fire remains one of the biggest threats to living, and a fire on a spacecraft, especially so, as a fire in space acts completely differently than it does on Earth. Flames become slow, spherical blobs that feed on the airflow in an oxygen-rich environment, like a spaceship, turning the craft into a giant convection oven.
NASA has already spent decades studying space fires, igniting controlled fires in detached cargo capsules. They found that the fires they set spread unpredictably, so unpredictably that engineers realized all this earthbound testing was only giving them so much valuable information. They needed to test this in space, preferably within lunar gravity.
The Flammability of Materials on the Moon (FM2) mission is going to do exactly that. Planned for a late 2026 launch, FM2 will ignite small samples of material inside a sealed chamber on the Moon’s surface, then observe how fire behaves in lunar gravity over longer periods than the few seconds researchers get from drop towers or parabolic flights.
Engineers are worried that lunar gravity, which is about 1/6 of Earth’s, may allow certain materials to burn for longer and more steadily. Without strong upward airflow, flames theoretically won’t extinguish as easily. This means that something that wouldn’t even smolder on Earth and might eventually Peter out could be an ongoing problem that worsens over time on the Moon.
If the United States, or any global government or space agency, wants to build permanent settlements beyond the Earth, they have to go back to basics and figure out how to solve some of the fundamental problems we’ve already figured out here on Earth. That includes something as basic as how to put out a fire.
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