FLAMMA

Explore NASA's fire experiments in space: ask questions, test conditions, and compare investigations.

SoFIE-GEL · images.nasa.gov

Spacecraft fire safety

Fire is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in space.

NASA's microgravity fire research, made easy to find, compare and understand.

The Saturn V rocket of Apollo 6 climbing through the sky, its five engines leaving a huge trail of flame. images.nasa.gov · S68-27365

FLAMMA

For decades, NASA has burned materials in microgravity to learn how fire really behaves in space. The results are scattered across many experiments and reports, just as crews prepare to return to the Moon and head to Mars. Flamma brings them together in one place, so anyone can search, compare and understand them, and turn them into fire safety insights.

Created by orchidmanta for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026 · Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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Flamma is an independent student project by orchidmanta, made for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026 for education only. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, JAXA or any other organisation. All images, data and texts belong to their owners and are credited and linked to their sources; if anything should be corrected or removed, please get in touch ↗.

01 · The problem

Why fire in space is different

Hot gases don't rise

Without gravity, hot gas doesn't rise, so flames turn round and dim. [5]

Spacecraft have everything a fire needs

Fuel, oxygen and ignition are all on board, often with extra oxygen and nowhere to escape. [5]

Smoke looks different

Smoke particles differ in microgravity, so Earth smoke detectors can miss them. [5]

Future habitats will have more oxygen

Planned habitats use more oxygen at lower pressure, where test flames kept burning even without airflow. [6]

A firefighter in lightweight, fire-resistant protective gear developed with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, with a fire truck behind, 1982. images.nasa.gov · 9404292

02 · The approach

How NASA keeps crews safe

Every fire-safety measure on a spacecraft fits one of three pillars.

03 · History

Lessons written in fire

  1. 1967
    Cabin fire

    Apollo 1: fire in a pure-oxygen cabin

    A flash fire in the 100% oxygen cabin killed the crew during a launch-pad test.

    Lesson: Faster hatches, fewer flammable materials, fire-resistant suits. [1]

    Read more

    On Jan. 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were in a launch-pad test with the hatches closed and the cabin pressurized with 100% oxygen. A flash fire swept through the command module so quickly there was no time to open the hatches.

    The crew died from carbon monoxide and other toxic gases; their burns were likely survivable. The three-piece hatch took 90 seconds to open under ideal conditions and could not be opened under the rising pressure.

    The review board found evidence of arcing in wiring near the environmental control system, but could not pin down a single ignition source.

    What changed: a single hatch that opens in three seconds, strict limits on combustible materials (also in the lunar module), new spacesuits made of fire-resistant materials, and the redesigned Block II spacecraft.

    Read the full account in NASA's Apollo 1 case study ↗
    Apollo 1 crew Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in their spacesuits at Kennedy Space Center, shortly before the 1967 cabin fire that killed them. images.nasa.gov · S67-19770
  2. 1970
    Explosion

    Apollo 13: an oxygen tank explosion

    An overheated oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon; the crew survived in the lunar module.

    Lesson: Redesigned oxygen tanks and protected wiring. [2]

    Read more

    In 1965 the oxygen-tank heaters were changed from 28 to 65 volts, but their thermostatic switches were not. In a pad test the heaters stayed on for hours and reached about 1,000 °F, damaging the Teflon insulation inside tank number two.

    On the third day of the mission the tank exploded and damaged tank number one. The crew moved into the lunar module Aquarius as a lifeboat, adapted carbon-dioxide filters with Mission Control's help, and splashed down safely.

    What changed: a third oxygen tank in a separate bay, upgraded thermostats, no stirring fans inside the tanks, and all wiring sheathed in stainless steel.

    Read the full account in NASA's Apollo 13 case study ↗
    Apollo 13 recovery on 17 April 1970: astronaut Jack Swigert is lifted to a helicopter in a net while Jim Lovell waits in the life raft beside the capsule. images.nasa.gov · S70-35651
  3. 1997
    Equipment fire

    Mir: a fire from an oxygen generator

    An oxygen generator caught fire aboard the station; the crew survived.

    Lesson: Lessons carried into the ISS. [3]

    Read more

    On Feb. 24, 1997, a solid-fuel oxygen generator in Mir's Kvant-1 module caught fire. The multinational crew, including NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger, survived.

    The extensive damage made it difficult to analyse the fire's cause.

    What changed: the lessons learned were passed on to the design and operation of the International Space Station.

    Read the full account in NASA's article on the Mir fire ↗
    Cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev on a spacewalk outside the Mir space station in April 1997, two months after the fire. images.nasa.gov · NM23-48-003
  4. 2026
    Smoke alarm

    Artemis II: a fire alarm far from home

    The smoke alarm went off near the end of the mission. "You want to get somebody's attention really quick, make the fire alarm go off… 80,000 miles from home." (Commander Reid Wiseman) [4]

    Read more

    Near the end of the mission, the smoke alarm in the Orion spacecraft went off. Commander Reid Wiseman later described it with the quote above.

    It is a reminder that, decades after Apollo, fire remains one of the first things a crew far from Earth worries about.

    Read the full account in the Aerospace America article ↗
    The Artemis II rocket lifting off. images.nasa.gov · NHQ202604010261

Closer to home

Malaysia's first astronaut lived on the ISS

In October 2007, Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor became the first Malaysian in space, spending about ten days on the International Space Station. He lived in the same kind of cabin air that NASA's fire research works to keep safe. [10]

Curious what would happen to a flame in the cabin air Dr Sheikh Muszaphar breathed on the ISS?

Try Will It Burn?
Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor in a Russian Sokol launch and entry suit during training in Star City, Russia, July 2007. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center · images.nasa.gov
Moon: art002e012702 · images.nasa.gov

04 · The research

Why NASA studies fire in microgravity

Fire behaves too differently in space to rely on Earth tests, so NASA burns materials on the ISS and even in an uncrewed cargo ship. Flamma brings eight of these investigations together.

Still unknown: fire at Moon or Mars gravity, and at spacesuit conditions. NASA tests suggest flames may survive at the lowest oxygen levels near Moon gravity, which is why NASA plans to test materials on the Moon itself. [7] Until then, ACME's E-FIELD Flames experiment on the ISS shows one way to imitate gravity: an electric field pushes on the charged particles in a flame, creating a force on it "just as buoyancy does in a gravitational field". [11]

Inside the International Space Station's Destiny laboratory in 2001: astronaut James Voss works at a station while Scott Horowitz floats through the hatch. images.nasa.gov · 0201589

05 · Explore

Explore NASA's fire data

Ask

Plain-English answers, with sources.

Will It Burn?

Set the conditions, see what NASA's tests did.

NASA Investigations

Search and compare the eight investigations.

Back on Earth

How NASA's fire research in space helps people on Earth.
images.nasa.gov · jsc2023e002281

Ask NASA's fire experiments

Search decades of microgravity combustion research in plain English.

Try asking

Will It Burn?

Set the conditions of a fire scenario in space, and see what NASA's experiments say.

Quick pick

Moon base and rover use NASA's expected habitat air: 30% oxygen or more, at 10.2 psi (0.7 bar) or less. NASA hasn't published a Mars habitat atmosphere yet, so Mars base uses the same air with Mars gravity.

Photos: images.nasa.gov · iss042e013697 · art002e012702 · iss017e008532 · 20250331-03 (JAXA/Toyota) · PIA14832 · iss064e004158

Set the conditions of your fire scenario

Conditions

"Any" = unknown, ignored in the ranking. For sliders, tick its "Any" box.

Any%
Anybar
What's burning
Airflow
Gravity

Illustration based on general combustion trends. Results come from NASA data.

Your test

NASA Investigations

The combustion investigations behind Flamma, flown on the ISS or a Cygnus cargo ship. Data from NASA's Physical Sciences Informatics (PSI) system.

Download the data

Cleaned from NASA's PSI tables. Each file keeps the PSI ID and the original notes.

Not used in the "Will It Burn?" ranking (but shown here and used by Ask): CFI-G inverse flames (154 tests; oxygen flows from the burner, not the room, so it isn't a room oxygen level), ACME BRE (daily summaries, not individual tests), BASS (NASA's table lists samples only, no conditions or outcomes per test) and SPICE (smoke-point flames that all burned on purpose). Outcomes are our reading of each table; see each test's notes for the original wording.

Earth seen from the International Space Station in 2014, with the station's robotic arm in front.

Back on Earth

From spacecraft fires to safer firefighters

Fire safety technology built for space has also made firefighting on Earth safer.

images.nasa.gov · iss040e030167
A firefighter in the Project FIRES protective suit, standing beside a 19th-century steam fire pump. NASA Spinoff 1982, p. 111 · NTRS
1967 → 1982

Fire-proof fabric

40% lighter firefighter gear

  1. The problemIn 1967, a flash fire inside the Apollo 1 spacecraft killed its three astronauts.
  2. In spaceNASA, the Air Force and Celanese developed PBI, a fabric that doesn't burn or melt, for astronaut and pilot flight suits. It flew on later Apollo missions.
  3. On EarthProject FIRES (NASA and the U.S. Fire Administration) built new firefighter gear from space materials like PBI: about 12½ lb in all, 40% lighter, tested by 14 U.S. fire departments.
NASA Spinoff 1982 Ask Flamma about this
Brunswick incipient fire detector sensors and their smoke-detector control panel. NASA Spinoff 1978 · NTRS
Space Shuttle → 1978

Early-warning smoke detector

Before flames or smoke appear

  1. The problemOrdinary smoke detectors only react once there is smoke, and dust can set off false alarms.
  2. In spaceBrunswick built the Incipient Fire Detector for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It samples the air and spots a fire before flames and smoke, and can tell burning particles from dust.
  3. On EarthThe U.S. Bureau of Mines tested it for a year on a huge coal-mine drilling machine in Indiana, where friction and sparks can start costly fires. It was also tried in a military airplane.
NASA Spinoff 1978 Ask Flamma about this
A firefighter wearing the lightweight breathing apparatus climbs from a window onto a ladder. NASA Spinoff 1976, p. 66 · NTRS
Moon → 1976

Lighter air tanks

13 lb lighter breathing pack

  1. The problemFirefighters sometimes skipped their heavy breathing gear because it slowed them down and blocked their view, with disastrous results.
  2. In spaceNASA Johnson Space Center designed breathing systems for astronauts working outside the spacecraft and on the Moon.
  3. On EarthThe new firefighter pack: 20 lb for 30 minutes of air, a clearer face mask and a low-air alarm only the wearer hears. Tested in Houston, Los Angeles and New York, then sold as the Air Pak 4.5.
NASA Spinoff 1976 Ask Flamma about this
NASA's Water Mist experiment hardware: a combustion chamber insert with cables, valves and a mass flow controller, mounted in a metal test frame. Water Mist experiment hardware · images.nasa.gov 0103199
ISS → 2020

Fine-water-mist extinguishers

Water + nitrogen instead of CO₂

  1. The problemThe ISS used carbon dioxide extinguishers, but the crew's emergency breathing equipment doesn't filter CO₂.
  2. In spaceNASA-funded research at the Colorado School of Mines studied fine water mist as a replacement for halon chemical extinguishers, with an experiment built for Space Shuttle Columbia (pictured). ADA Technologies and NASA Glenn then built a mist extinguisher that mixes water and nitrogen and works in any direction, because it doesn't rely on gravity.
  3. On EarthIts leak-proof valve, made by Doering Company, is now used in industry: in more than 450 military munitions trailers, grease dispensers for car assembly and hydraulic equipment for printing presses.
NASA Spinoff 2020

About 60% of house fires in Malaysia are caused by electrical problems, says the Fire and Rescue Department (Bomba). [8] In US homes, the item that most often catches fire first in an electrical fire is wire and cable insulation (30%). [9] Insulated wire is exactly what JAXA's FLARE experiment burns in space, including wires given too much current on purpose to imitate a short circuit.

The W40 'Space Butterfly' nebula, a cloud of gas and dust where new stars form, seen in infrared by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Investigations

Combustion science in space

Why NASA burns things on the International Space Station, and what it is testing now.

images.nasa.gov · PIA23121

01 · Why study fire in space?

Fire runs the world, and we still can't fully predict it

~85%of delivered energy in the U.S. comes from combustion
Hundredsof chemical species and thousands of reactions in a simple flame
80+ yearsof combustion research, and a kitchen stove is still too complex to model in full detail

Combustion powers electricity, transport, glass and steel making, but it also produces greenhouse gases, soot and wildfires. On Earth, gravity makes hot flame gases rise and hides the details scientists want to study. On the ISS, with gravity removed, flames become simpler to study, and the station is also a test-bed for spacecraft fire risk.

02 · Why gravity matters

A flame is about 8 times lighter than the air around it

A typical flame is about 2,300 K, while the room is about 300 K. That makes the hot gas about eight times less dense over just a centimetre. On Earth, this pushes the flame upward and makes it flicker. Without gravity, that upward flow disappears, and a flame can be studied as a much simpler, one-dimensional system.

03 · Current experiments

What NASA is testing now

A candle flame in microgravity, at Moon gravity (1/6 g) and on Earth, side by side: round and dim, then taller, then tall and bright.

FM2

The first combustion experiment on the Moon: will materials burn at lower oxygen at 1/6 gravity?

NASA page

SoFIE

Five ISS studies of how solid materials ignite, burn and go out, from flat acrylic sheets to thick spheres.

NASA page
A flame spreading along an insulated wire in a FLARE experiment.

FLARE

A JAXA-led project predicting how flammable materials are in space from tests on the ground.

Other investigations

04 · Where the experiments happen

The Fluids and Combustion Facility on the ISS

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins opens the Combustion Integrated Rack's combustion chamber on the ISS, March 2021. images.nasa.gov · iss064e040971

Combustion Integrated Rack (CIR)

Launched in 2008 to the ISS's U.S. laboratory, Destiny, it is the only rack on the ISS just for combustion, with a 100-litre combustion chamber. It provides up to 90% of the hardware an experiment needs, for fire prevention, detection and suppression, flame spread, soot and more. FLEX and CFI-G ran here.

The Combustion Integrated Rack ground test unit during a vibration test at NASA Glenn, 2004. CIR ground test unit · GRC-2004-C-01821

Built and tested at NASA Glenn

Both racks of the Fluids and Combustion Facility were developed at NASA Glenn in Cleveland, Ohio, where a ground copy of the CIR was tested before flight. Both are still run remotely from Glenn. Its partner, the Fluids Integrated Rack (FIR), launched in 2009, is a large optics bench for fluid experiments such as boiling, two-phase flow and life support.

05 · Archived experiments

NASA's past combustion experiments

Where to next

Explore the investigations

NASA investigations Other investigations

Source: NASA Glenn Research Center, Combustion Science ↗, with its FM2 and SoFIE pages.

Other investigations

Fire safety research by other space agencies, beyond NASA's investigations in Flamma's data.

A flame spreading along an insulated wire in a FLARE experiment. FLARE · NASA Glenn

JAXA · Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

FLARE

Flammability Limits at Reduced-g Experiment, in the Kibo module on the ISS (since 2022)

FLARE burns solid materials, from paper and acrylic to insulated wires, in a slow airflow and finds the lowest oxygen level at which a flame keeps spreading. Its goal is a new international standard that predicts how flammable a material is in space from tests on Earth. JAXA's module can test up to 45% oxygen at low pressure, like planned Moon habitats, and found that an overloaded wire can ignite violently in microgravity.

JAXA page Ask Flamma about FLARE

Courtesy of JAXA. More agencies' investigations can be added here.

All NASA investigations

What the results show

Made from the investigation's data table below. Hover a bar or dot to see its numbers.

The data

Show:

Ask about this investigation

Answers come from this investigation's table and NASA's documents about it.