A pair of Colorado-developed fire extinguishers that have been 18 years in the making will hitch a ride to the International Space Station on Thursday afternoon.
Two portable water-mist fire extinguishers grounded in Colorado School of Mines research are part of the payloads headed to the space station on Orbital ATK’s unmanned spacecraft atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The extinguishers, the first of nine that will be sent to ISS, were designed to replace the carbon dioxide-based units on board. Though they are effective CO2 carry some operational risks in that the gases discharged during a fire could be hazardous to the human crew, NASA combustion scientist Gary A. Ruff said.
“If a crew member was to breathe that atmosphere directly, it would be a poisonous mixture for the crew,” he said.
The water-mist extinguisher that NASA picked for this ISS resupply mission and future space missions is rooted in work by researchers at the School of Mines and businesses such as ADA Technologies in Littleton.
In 1997, Angel Abbud-Madrid, now the director of the Center for Space Resources at Mines, and professors Thomas McKinnon and Edward Riedel, were looking for an alternative to halon in fire suppression. Halon chemicals are highly effective in putting out fires, however, they don’t easily break down and contribute to ozone depletion.
Abbud-Madrid and crew turned their research to the oldest known fire-fighting technology: water.
Water had many advantages, Abbud-Madrid said. It’s non-toxic and effective. But it came with plenty of its own questions and drawbacks, chief among them the sometimes substantial damage from water.
Researchers looked at the ways water particles behaved in a fire and how droplets absorbed heat and displaced the oxygen around the fire. By atomizing the water particles, small amounts of water could be made more effective at fighting fire.
“Why not just have that 1 millimeter droplet and break it up 100 or 500 more times?” he said.
Fighting fire with a fog-like mist caught the attention of NASA and Abbud-Madrid’s research eventually found its way to tests on drop towers, parabolic aircraft and the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia mission.
On the ill-fated Columbia, crew members conducted three dozen tests to determine how various droplet sizes performed in fighting a controlled fire in a cylindrical chamber. Researchers were able to download the data after each test and adjust the subsequent experiments on the shuttle.
The last two tests didn’t download correctly and the data were thought lost after the Columbia’s fatal explosion on re-entry.
“About four months after the accident, they found a hard drive in the middle of Texas in the rain and snow with a serial number that matched our experiment,” he said.
A small amount of the data was extracted, but that portion proved critical to the development of the devices set to be launched Thursday.
“I think this is quite a fitting tribute to the crew of Columbia to see the work that they helped, to see that all the way to a technology base to protect the lives of the crews for (missions) not only to the Earth’s orbit but perhaps all the way to the moon and Mars,” he said.
After the accident, Abbud-Madrid’s team regrouped and took the results to ADA Technologies Inc. in Littleton to develop a vessel for the technology.
ADA and, eventually, Wyle Engineering and Flexial Corp. helped craft an extinguisher that was the same size as the carbon dioxide units on ISS and can also correctly dispense the mist in a zero-gravity situation.
ADA investigated commercial applications here on Earth, but found them too costly to pursue, ADA vice president Thierry Carriere said.
“It’s very rewarding to see basic research go all the way to the development of an application, a very important application,” said Abbud-Madrid, who was in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the launch.
“That’s the irony of all this,” he continued, “18 years of research and work and you really hope it never gets used.”
Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace@denverpost.com or @aliciawallace
Want to watch the launch?
The International Space Station resupply launch is scheduled for 3:55 p.m. Mountain time Thursday and will be broadcast live at nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv