LNG Explosion

Tank truck with 60 TONS of gas explodes in Ulaanbaatar
Chuck Pergiel

RT reports:

The accident in Mongolia’s capital has killed six and left 14 injured. A truck carrying 60 tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) collided with a car and exploded in the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar.

 

Truck & cryogenic trailer

LNG is about half as dense as water. Cooling natural gas to −260 °F will turn it into a liquid, reducing its volume by a factor of 600. Tanks are lightly pressurized at around 4 or 5 PSI (pounds per square inch). A single trailer can carry about 30 tons of LNG, so either there were two trailers involved in this accident or somebody got the number wrong. At least they were only off by a factor of 2, not 2 zillion. Not bad for an innumerate journalist.  Where is Ulaanbaatar anyway? Middle of nowhere, that's where:

Ulaanbaatar Mongolia

Note that just past the west end of Mongolia there is a short stretch of border between Russia and China. Mongolia is surrounded by Russia and China.

SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster

SpaceX Starship Heavy Booster holds 750 tons of liquid methane (LNG is basically methane), so it's going to take 25 trailer loads to fill the booster.

Update December 2025 replaced missing video.

Helium

Gazprom Helium Service

The first road bridge between Russia and China just opened. They built a railroad bridge a few years ago, but this is the first road bridge. The new road bridge is just over a thousand meters long. I suspect the big trick was making a bridge that is strong enough to withstand the ice in the winter and during the spring thaw when the ice starts to break up and big chunks start careening downstream, smashing everything in their path. 

Cool bridge, but what caught my eye was this line:

On Friday, the first eight China-bound Russian trucks from the Gazprom Helium Service fleet, powered by liquefied natural gas, crossed the bridge via the Kani-Kurgan-Heihe checkpoint.

Helium use in the USA used to be controlled by the Federal government, but that was a while back. Evidently there is plenty available now, baring industrial accidents and political wrangling.

One of these days, Alice . . .

Showcasing SpaceX's Shiny Stainless Starship
Elon Musk did a presentation last night about the new spaceship SpaceX is building. I tried watching it, but it's long (an hour and a half) and, as Scott Manley notes, Elon is not the best speaker. Scott sums up the presentation pretty well here.

The part that I find interesting is that 50 years ago the science fiction artists who drew shiny spaceships with fins that landed using their rocket engines were exactly right.

All this is going on in Boca Chica which is on the gulf coast of southern Texas a couple of miles from the Mexican border.

. . . pow! Right to the moon.

P.S. Somewhere in all this Elon mentioned that they are super cooling (or maybe hyper cooling?) the methane.

• Methane turns to liquid around −160 °C,. 
• SpaceX is going to be cooling it down very close to the freezing point, which is −182.5 °C, which is only 20 degrees cooler. 
• Oxygen, the bigger part of the fuel package boils at −182.962 °C. 

So the freezing point of methane is one half a degree higher than the boiling point of oxygen. Managing these two substances in close proximity to each other while keeping them both liquid is going to be a bit of a trick. Maybe that's why they call it rocket science.

LOX

How Israel's Lander Crashed Into The Moon, And How Falcon Heavy Flew  Except I've skipped over the Lunar Lander story to get to the LOX.
Just the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Bonus: starting around 17:30 we have an animation of a large space telescope being loaded on the BFR, now known as Starship.

Fun with Science

Hot Charcoal in Liquid Oxygen (THERMAL IMAGING) - Periodic Table of Videos
This video is pretty entertaining, and a little educational. A few points:

• Make your own liquid oxygen using nothing but liquid nitrogen.
• Cold charcoal doesn't react with liquid oxygen.
• Liquid oxygen will eventually extinguish burning charcoal.