Hey Bob,Glad to have you with us. My grandfather was the Bn CO of one of the 540th's battalions (the one Marion's father wasn't in) which brought me to the site a few years ago. I's a great place for research and fellowship of other WWII (and some other wars) minded history buffs. I'm on pretty regularly (thankfully the Marine network has not blocked Marion's site! You go to the WBG site and you get "You have attempted to access a site which has been blocked in accordance with Marine Corps and DoN policy governing the appropriate use of government information systems. Reason: The Websense category "Message Boards and Forums" is filtered. http://forums.wildbillguarnere.com/index.php?act=idx." I guess Marion's site flys below the radar or perhaps it's because it doesn't have "forum" in the URL.
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I'm curious about this. In what form is the waste? I would figure most of it in the form of the trail of exhaust from the thing. Is that what you are cleaning up? "Fallout"?
Thanks for the welcome.
As to the space shuttle program, there are some 20 processes or operations that the shuttle goes through in preparation for or refurbishing after launch. Paint and asbestos removal and reapplication -- asbestos lines the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) -- the two cylinders on the sides of the launch vehicle; insulation application to the main hydrogen and oxgen fuel tanks (the big central cylinder of the launch vehicle); fueling and cleaning operations for the Orbital Manuvering System (the small rockets scattered aroun the shuttle allowing it to steer and position itself in space). The largest amount comes from 3 millions pounds of water dumped into the exhaust on lauch to suppress the noise. The SRBs burn an alumininum perchlorate fuel, which generates hydrogen chloride as an exhaust. The main engine burns hydrogen and oxygen generating water as an exhaust. When the two exhaust streams mix, you get hydrochloric acid. The sound suppression water in addition to reducing noise washes the hydrochloric acid out of the air around the launch area an dilutes it.
My work was in preparation for launching the shuttle from the west coast, which never came about. NASA designed the shuttle for its major mission, low earth orbiting satellites, which didn't fit well with the military mission of high earth orbits. It would be like using Arnold Schwarzenagger's Hummer in the place of an Army Hummvee -- they have similar shapes and similar names, but they don't do the same job. As a result most of my work went for naught, with the exception that NASA did adopt a scrubber we designed to clean the dry nitrogen they used to remove hydrazine fuels from the small rockets for refurbishing. The monomethyl hydrazine they use is a great rocket fuel, but a really bad neurotoxin.