To: new@kidie.seene
Subject: Re: "astrolite" does it exist and how do you make it???

In article <3310DB51.50BA@explosives-no-email-yet> you write:
>Would some one please tell me if astrolit exists or is it a hoaks and is
>it realy as powerful as people claim that it is. I would also like to
>know how to make this stuff if it is real.

   Astrolite is no hoax.  This stuff, invented (I believe) in the late
1960's was then claimed to be the most powerful liquid explosive of usable
stability. 
   Original astrolite was made by mixing two components: ammonium nitrate,
a weak & difficult-to-initiate salt with a positive oxygen balance, and
hydrazine, a liquid fuel with a negative heat of formation.  The mixture
is one-to-one molar, and the product is a liquid.  It is powerful & easy
to explode.  In fact, it is one of the few explosive liquids that cn be
sprayed on the ground and allowed to seep into the soil, and then still be
exploded.  It was thought at the time that this would make the stuff the
very thing for clearing land mines; I don't know exectly why, but nobody
clears mines that way today. 
   As to making it yourself, stay away from hydrazine.  Chemically pure
anhydrous hydrazine is big-time poisonous and carcinogenic, and capable of
spontaneously exploding.  Worse, the process usually given for home
manufacture requires careful control to work at all (do you own a pH
meter?), involves chlorine gas (yet another hazard), and produces hydrated
hydrazine containing byproducts that are even nastier: you still aren't
ready to mix until you've purified & dehydrated the stuff.

   On the larger scale, give it up.  If there was a way to safely make a
powerful & readily-detonated explosive from easily available ingredients,
do you *really* think that there is any way of preventing the recipie from
being common knowledge?

-- 
Robert Wieland                   wieland@me.udel.edu 
You can't go faster than light, you can't get colder than absolute 
zero, and you can't help somebody by not telling them the truth.