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Fire on a spacecraft can be catastrophic. It can spread quickly in a confined space, and for trapped astronauts, there may be no escape. It\u2019s fading in time now, but Apollo 1, which was to be the first crewed Apollo mission, never got off the ground because of a fire that killed the crew. There\u2019ve been other dangerous spacecraft fires too, like the one onboard the Russian Mir space station in 1997. <\/p>\n
In an effort to understand how fire behaves in spacecraft, NASA began its Saffire (Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment) in 2016. Saffire was an eight-year, six-mission effort to study how fire behaves in space. The final Saffire test was completed on January 9th.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Fire behaviour in buildings here on Earth is well-studied and well-understood. Fire prevention and suppression are important components in building design. It makes sense to bring that same level of understanding to space travel and even to surpass it.<\/p>\n \u201cHow big a fire does it take for things to get bad for a crew?\u201d asked Dr. David Urban, Saffire principal investigator at NASA\u2019s Glenn Research Centre. \u201cThis kind of work is done for every other inhabited structure here on Earth \u2013 buildings, planes, trains, automobiles, mines, submarines, ships \u2013 but we hadn\u2019t done this research for spacecraft until Saffire.\u201d<\/p>\n NASA has conducted six experiments under Saffire, and each one was conducted in an uncrewed Cygnus cargo vehicle after it completed its supply mission to the ISS. The vehicles are sent into the atmosphere to burn up, and the experiments are run prior to the vehicle\u2019s destruction. Saffire 1 ran in 2016 inside an avionics bay with an airflow duct. The bay contained a cotton and fibreglass burn blend, which was ignited remotely with a hot wire. <\/p>\n \n