In world first, China’s LandSpace methane rocket sends satellites into orbit
(www.scmp.com)
from naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca to world@lemmy.world on 09 Dec 2023 16:14
https://lemmy.ca/post/10972315
from naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca to world@lemmy.world on 09 Dec 2023 16:14
https://lemmy.ca/post/10972315
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Great.
Don’t we not want to add methane to the atmosphere?
The majority of methane added is from ground support. Idk if it ruins fuel or oxidizer rich, but if it’s oxidizer rich, virtually no methane will come out the engines without being burned to co2 and water.
We don’t want CO2 either, do we?
Methane is like 16x worse, but yes. It might be feasible to make methane from atmospheric capture though, (much easier than kerosene) which would make it net natural.
Counterintuitively, methane fueled rockets enable a pathway to have carbon neutral rocket launches so we wouldn’t be adding any CO2.
How does that work? The methane is collected from carbon-neutral sources?
Nope! Instead its possible to pull gaseous CO2 right out of the air, and turn it into methane. Pretty wild, eh? The principle it works on is call the Sabatier Reaction.
Interesting! Thank you!
It’s a gigantic improvement over hydrazine rocket fuel used by rockets like SpaceX’s. Hydrazine is poisonous. A methane leak is dangerous but not immediately deadly.
SpaceX doesn’t use hydrazine or any other hypergolic fuels in its rockets (the one exception is the emergency engines on the Crew Dragon capsule used for humans, but these engines have never been used in crew flights).
Older rockets in China (like the Long March 2) or Russia (like the Proton) still use those toxic hypergolic fuels for the main boosters.