Hey Cody! Put one of those electric motors that are made only of a battery and a twisted wire (the twisted wire spins around the batery when in contact with the two poles) inside the vacuum chamber and see how much faster it goes without air resistance!
@@mike-0451 Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub Yo da dub dub Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub Yo da dub dub (I'm the Scatman) Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub Yo da dub dub Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub Yo da dub dub Ba-da-ba-da-ba-be bop bop bodda bope Bop ba bodda bope Be bop ba bodda bope Bop ba bodda Ba-da-ba-da-ba-be bop ba bodda bope Bop ba bodda bope Be bop ba bodda bope Bop ba bodda bope
At 7000 K the exhaust would be a plasma, so perhaps you could use some sort of magnetic "bottle" to confine the reaction and place it outside the vehicle, obviating the need for cooling.
@ completely different aims. The magnetic field like they use in tokamak reactors can handle far higher temperatures (basically unlimited) so the exhaust could be kept far hotter and thus work far better, it would also save on the weight of the cooling system though that depends on how much weight the magnetic system would require.
@@Jake12220 In that case weight would be relatively irrelevant, cause it's fixed weight. With hydrogen cooling you need to have liquid hydrogen as a "fuel", so rocket equation and all that stuff, it's not only weight but also volume and is not easily scalable. With fixed weight of magnetic rig you will easily compansate with higher energy density and higher exhaust speeds of metallic hydrogen.
@@avelkm l agree for the most part, my only concern is how the energy for the magnetic field is being generated. If the power can be generated from the hydrogen or a process already happening then great, but if it needed a large battery type system then the weight would be a concern. On the upside the feild would likely be controllable so could vary the width of the exhaust as needed for even greater efficiency.
When it comes to research projects gone silent either: Theory 1 They are developing it and have had no significiant Progress to announce Theory 2 Goverment Cover up , they have done further breakthroughs but are staying silent to avoid others noticing potentialy lucrative technologies
Scott, very good and informative video as always, but the device they used is called "Diamond Anvil Cell" (often just called "DAC" in research literature), not just "Diamond Anvil". A DAC does utilise two diamond anvils usually, although there are special ones that have two smaller diamonds on top of the larger anvils. The highest pressures achieved with this technique go up to 770 GPa (as claimed by a team in 2015), which is much more than the ~350 GPa in the Earth's core, and also much higher than the pressure of ~500 GPa that was reached by Dias and Silvera for the metallic hydrogen publication.
Wouldn't it also be a huge safety headache even if it is meta-stable? You still have a huge tank of explosive material that doesn't need to mix with anything to explode, and that means you are one containment or cooling failure away from everything in general vicinity turning into high temperature plasma...
The reason metallic hydrogen would be amazing as a superconductor is because it would theoretically be one close to room temperature as opposed to our current superconductors that needs to stay close to 0K
There is a SciFi-movie from the 50s (maybe is was Destination Moon) where the fuel tanks said "atomic hydrogen". They were waaaay ahead of their time :-)
11:38 Yeah, I was going to say something about that. Although liquid hydrogen has a very high energy density in terms of energy per unit mass, its energy density in terms of energy per unit volume is TERRIBLE. This problem expands to much more than just the fuel tanks, too: you need larger ducts for moving it, larger turbines to pressurize/move it, etc. You actually ad a LOT more mass to your ship and far more inefficiency just by using such an "efficient" fuel as hydrogen. It looks good on paper, if you only look at its energy content, but in practice it's just not practical.
I'm fairly sure the Tiger got blown up by the allied aircraft seen streaking overhead, rather than by .45acp Also, a modern shoulder launched anti-tank projectile weighs about 1kg. So even though metallic hydrogen might turn out to be hilariously explosive, we'll probably never see any .45 anti tank rounds. But perhaps 50bmg anti-tank might be possible. In which case traditional MBTs will be obsolete.
Could you make more in depth videos comparing different rocket fuels and their different specific impulses, the pros and cons of each, engineering challenges such as cooling or lack thereof, how cleanly they burn...Etc.... I'd be really into that sort of info comparing long past and retired engines and modern and future designs. Thank you as usual for breaking this down! Have a great day!
First first reaction when i saw the title: "Oh no, you don't! Not while i'm less than 20 kilometers away". That stuff is tricky enough to handle when you want to make a few atoms of it. Trying to build a pressure vessel big enough to hold tons and tons of it at 495 gigapascals... Oh my...
Besides that they look pretty basic. Had one in my hand once. The cool thing about those and similiar anvils is, that you can create enourm pressure just tighten some screws with your hand because of the small area the pressure focus on. Although for experiments like these they use something more controllable I assume.
What about having the combustion happen almost externally and controlled by super cooled magnets so that no ridiculously hot matter physically reaches any physical part of the space craft? Somewhat like the VASIMR engine and the fusion chamber of the National Ignition Facility.
Antimatter is the ultimate fuel, black holes are the ultimate engine. But we can't make enough Amat(let alone store it), and we can't even make a black hole.
Bad Beard Bill and of course you'd need cooling rods the length of Route 66 to disperse the extremely intense heat generated during the annihilation of the Amat into a propellant.
Good time of day, Scott Manley. You say that the temperature of the exhaust for a pure metallic hydrogen engine would be around 7,000 K, and that it would melt any existing material. Wouldn't it be possible for us to use magnetic fields to shape the exhaust away from the engine parts, in a way that kind of resembles a plasma thruster?
The hydrogen would have to be ionized for that to work, and your magnetic field would have to generate as much force as the extremely energetic rocket exhaust - in fact, if you could do that, you wouldn't even need a rocket nozzle.
Won't this new "fuel" be about 1,000,000 as expensive to manufacture and about 1,000,000 as likely to lead to massive death and destruction? Maybe we'll see this in common use in a few centuries, who knows.
New materials don't necessarily get cheap, or even that much cheaper. For example, monoisomeric medicine have been known for as long as we have known of medical chemistry and isomeric compounds. Isomeric molecules have identical contents but are different in shape, which makes them extremely hard to separate with traditional chemical processes and requires inefficient and expensive separation methods. However, they're very useful in certain medical needs. Cisplatin is a common and effective chemotherapy drug, but its isomeric counterpart, transplatin, is medically useless. In order for the chemotherapy to work, the cisplatin must be very pure, and producing it is still almost as expensive as it has ever been. Then there are of course unstable substances which will always need specialized equipment to produce and can't effectively be stored for any period of time. For example certain isotopes of Polonium can only be produced in 3 most advanced nuclear physics laboratories in the world, 2 of them in Russia and 1 in USA. Materials like these will always be extremely expensive to acquire in any real quantities.
At 8:20 or so, in the talk about metalic Hydrogen being Meta-stabile, I believe that a team at Sandia National Labs determined decades ago that it was not.
The high exhaust gas velocities account for object falling out of windows faster than a free fall too. =) Think Scott either ignored or missed the conspiracy here.
I thought antimatter was the best rocket fuel... Seriously though, even without the extra ISP over liquid Hydrogen, this new fuel would have the advantage of being more dense, and avoid the cryogenic requirement - that alone is really cool.
Yes, it is, but producing and storing antimatter is way harder than producing and storing metalic hydrogen, and when they may be metalic-hydrogen rockets in the next 30 years or so, building functional antimatter rocket may take another century or even more.
Well done Scott, very interesting as always. This is my favourite channel by far, I love watching these "science series" videos. KSP brought me here, but there are so many other good reasons that keep me here. Always looking forward to what you upload next...
There's a principle in explosives that "bang per pound" (or kg) is useless if the stuff can't be controlled. Well, it's true of rocket propellants, too! Once you solve the problems of producing and containing the substance, you then still have to figure out how to make dead certain that it will go off when you want it to, and not when you don't! So for metallic H, those are some tall hurdles, but if they *could* be surmounted - oh, boy!! Thanks, Scott; there's some great material here! Fred
Turns out we won't see any rockets running on metallic hydrogen or antimatter anytime soon. Mr. Scott, you have outstanding skill to explain things, keep going please.
HAha, my mighty (but likely not actually working, and probably completely overhyped) reactionless EM-drive pwns your silly neutrino drive! Now watch me attach it to a lever and produce torque from nothing! Watch my kinetic energy output/energy input ratio soar as it gains speed, until l reach efficiency coefficients >1 I spit at conservation of momentum! I spit at conservation of angular momentum! I spit at thermodynamics! Bet you and your stupid neutrino drive feel stupid now! EM-drive master race!
How would you store Neutrinos?? They are the very definition of low interaction particles: no container can hold them and any electromagnetic containment would fail since they have no charge and no magnetic moment.... So no, Neutrino Rockets are not a good idea.
And that's just perfect for SSTO. You use LOX as both cooling agent and additional energy source on takeoff to generate more thrust and then switch to LH2 for cooling to generate more ISP.
I come from the future when another KSP2 trailer was released. What you can do is put cesium into the metallic hydrogen to allow it to be affected by magnets. Then, using a rocket nozzle made of concentric electromagnetic rings, you could create a rocket nozzle for the metallic hydrogen, without ever having your rocket come into direct contact with the bulk of the 7000K temperatures.
I think it's the other way around. Use the metallic hydrogen like nitrous in a conventional liquid hydrogen engine. Instead of using liquid hydrogen to cool a metallic hydrogen engine. Or maybe it's basically the same regardless of how you look at it. Either way, if we can improve (more efficient) exciting technology with it then that would be great.
Well, leaving aside how much energy you could get from it if it was stable with a combination of temperature or pressure we could maintain in a container we shipped to space, wouldn't you still just ship oxygen along for another huge chemical energy boost with the hot and high-pressure hydrogen gas we suddenly have in our possession? Even if liquid oxygen is relatively heavy it should still be worth it being a phase of the engine... which if I were naming it I'd probably call a ruminant engine.
Hey Scott, do you think there would be a benefit to having a secondary engine after the metallic hydrogen engine that combines liquid oxygen with the hydrogen gas exhaust of the metallic engine and combusts those as well? It seems silly to even consider adding that much complexity to the design since a metallic hydrogen engine would already be so complex, and a metallic hydrogen engine would already be so much more powerful than a liquid oxygen hydrogren rocket. However it occurred to me that the exhaust product of the metallic hydrogen engine is one component of our current most efficient rocket fuel. I guess you'd have to combust the hydrogen and oxygen without decreasing the velocity of the H2 exhaust? It just seemed like an interesting thought experiment, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
If you can mass produce Metallic Hydrogen, then i guess you could also make Metallic Oxygen? Would combining those two lower the temperature in the engine?
2:11 "That's like... 50 times the energy of TNT... " Scott's face... My face... And more than likely everyone else interested enough to watch this videos face lights up hehehehehe It's like the day I found out how much more I could get out of my sterling engine with Petrol then alcohol xD excitement in the air people!!!
Might not be very good for rocket fuel but they do make great explosives. Things that make an Azidoazide azide explode: Moving it Touching it Dispersing it in solution Leaving it undisturbed on a glass plate Exposing it to a bright light Exposing it to X-Rays Putting it to a Spectrometer Turning on the Spectrometer Absolutely nothing...
Metalic hydrogen would behave as a high explosive. Take nitro glycerine for example: it gets a big part of its energy by recombining the diatomic Nitrogen atoms in to N(2) with their super strong triple bonds. Recombining H(2) in solid metalic hydrogen would produce a similar high velocity energy shockwave through the solid and it would "rapidly decompose" - i.e. not combust in any controllable manner. It would make one hell of a super weapon though, without all the drawbacks that come with Nukes.
Such a great series from a person who has a great personality and wealth of knowledge and ability. This is the kind of stuff I'm on youtube and looking for!
I keep seeing comments about metallic hydrogen being 1 billion dollars per ounce. Y'all are missing the point, guys. Demonstrate that it's physically possible first, then it just becomes an engineering problem. If we know it's possible, then we can start creating machines and manufacturing techniques to produce it in larger quantities and for less money, and we can figure out how to store it, etc. In fact, I'd wager we could probably get costs down to as little as $10 million per ounce! See? Totally doable
great video. off topic but can you remaster your old ksp videos? just like a simple tutorial like you used to do on launching, docking and landing. that sort of stuff. im a master at the game but i still enjoy watching ksp videos. they always put me in the mood to play. thankyou
Great discussion as always. I still look at chemical rockets as very old school, and am fascinated with gravity/anti-gravity propulsion as the newest most effective way to get around this universe. I know,i know...the fact that we need to generate a great deal of energy,that is not feasible as yet sets me thinking that Bob Lazar has the best conceptual proposal of using gravity waves. I am reading a great book titled Ignition! by John D. Clark ,most of you are probably familiar with. Working as an industrial chemist ,I find it very enlightening. Chemical rockets are still really just horse and buggy attempts to get us off this planet. Hope springs eternal.
Well, antimatter would be massively more expensive to produce and contain, and release massively more energy per unit of mass. By those standards, the metallic hydrogen would be "poor mans antimatter". It's a bit more sane material for now though, we haven't been able to produce any significant amounts of antimatter, and containing it has obviously been ridiculously hard mission.
Antimatter would be anything but efficient. It would require enormous magnetic fields to store safely, and those take energy to maintain. and even then magenetically neutral particlese can infultrate the contaimentunit.
Could you use a magnetic containment instead of a physical one for the combustion chamber? That might be a work around for the high temperatures instead of cooling it
The problem is, the gas you'd create doesn't have any charge. I don't think. Whatever the case, you can't use magnetic fields to contain materials with no charge.
Concentrating on Scott's discussion actually knocks me out. I wake up drooling on my keyboard. I would suggest an experiment with a liquid nitro cooler at the end of a centrofuge-like magnetically reinforced containment chamber; put the hydrogen in; either spin it or fire it into Mars and see what you get.
Serah Wint It's not ferrous, so I would say 'no'. For example, stainless steel (or pennies, or US quarters) won't attract a magnet. Magnetic confinement works with plasma, which is electrically conductive, and highly charged, making it susceptible to magnetic confinement. I don't think long term confinement of plasma has ever been achieved, either. They're hoping to get up to 8 minutes or so of continuous fusion with the biggest experimental reactor being built, which will only possibly lead to commercial viability of a fusion power plant by ~30 years from now. This depends on material science discovery required, and increased confinement pressure, and duration of maintained confinement.
It sounds like the issue is the energy consumption of your magnets. Probably superconductors so you'd need to cryogenically cool them constantly, absorbing all the heat from the propellant. Easiest way to do that is.. a tank of liquid hydrogen that you run through them and allow to boil, then mix with the propellant to cool it further. That's back to what Scott suggested, although it might end up being more efficient.
why arent they using osmium as an anvil? that stuff is insanely dense, and i believe that it does not react with hydrogen. please forgive me if i said anything dumb, i had only 1 year of physics/chemistry when i was 15... love to learn from you, really great vids btw
Its alright for not knowing, that's why people ask questions. None of us are material scientists so don't worry, the internet is full of bad things but Scott's channel is safe (for the time being)
Just for clarification, density is the amount of mass per volume, while hardness is a material's ability to resist a physical change in shape (scratching, crushing, cracking) that is related to the strength of atomic bonds. I might be wrong about hardness though.
It probably keeps the world peaceful if the people who run Russia, China, North Korea, Iran etc know that if they start shit Americans will kill them in large numbers and probably in a way which is scientifically and technologically very impressive.
Something about a scottish mans voice talking about rocket science is super calming. Kids want a bed time story heres uncle Scott to read you history of rocket fuels.
I wonder if cooling it with LOX rather that LH would be better. You'd get a little more energy, but the exhaust gas would be a lot heavier. Scott, have you ever considered writing an SF novel? I bet you would come up with an awesome story.
Lol Scott accidentally said “clit” near the end of the video XD. But in all seriousness it seems like cracking metallic hydrogen is similar to cracking nuclear fusion. Both of these intense energy sources come down to the temperature and pressure of hydrogen... great video!
I just noticed that you are sitting in front of the same shelf that I sit in front of! Just vastly different items on the shelf. lol
Cody'sLab Hey Cody you're pretty resourceful, mind making some metallic hydrogen and starting up your rocket program again? :)
Hey Cody! Put one of those electric motors that are made only of a battery and a twisted wire (the twisted wire spins around the batery when in contact with the two poles) inside the vacuum chamber and see how much faster it goes without air resistance!
Cody in 10 years "Sending rocket to mars"
Cody do this in your back yard
Kody's Space Program?
"Hydrogen doesn't really like being single" - pff, so what? Neither do I, but here I am.
Hydrogen is like those millitant incels
Scott Manley what?
@@mike-0451
Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Yo da dub dub
Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Yo da dub dub
(I'm the Scatman)
Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Yo da dub dub
Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Yo da dub dub
Ba-da-ba-da-ba-be bop bop bodda bope
Bop ba bodda bope
Be bop ba bodda bope
Bop ba bodda
Ba-da-ba-da-ba-be bop ba bodda bope
Bop ba bodda bope
Be bop ba bodda bope
Bop ba bodda bope
@@scottmanley You mean they pair together, out of despair?
Careful what ya wish for. . .
At 7000 K the exhaust would be a plasma, so perhaps you could use some sort of magnetic "bottle" to confine the reaction and place it outside the vehicle, obviating the need for cooling.
@ completely different aims. The magnetic field like they use in tokamak reactors can handle far higher temperatures (basically unlimited) so the exhaust could be kept far hotter and thus work far better, it would also save on the weight of the cooling system though that depends on how much weight the magnetic system would require.
@@Jake12220 In that case weight would be relatively irrelevant, cause it's fixed weight. With hydrogen cooling you need to have liquid hydrogen as a "fuel", so rocket equation and all that stuff, it's not only weight but also volume and is not easily scalable. With fixed weight of magnetic rig you will easily compansate with higher energy density and higher exhaust speeds of metallic hydrogen.
@@avelkm l agree for the most part, my only concern is how the energy for the magnetic field is being generated. If the power can be generated from the hydrogen or a process already happening then great, but if it needed a large battery type system then the weight would be a concern.
On the upside the feild would likely be controllable so could vary the width of the exhaust as needed for even greater efficiency.
As a SuperConductor Use It To Power Your Magnetic Bottle (also Stores AntiMatter, Too)
Matt TheChosen
Lenz AntiGravity Effect
This video requires an update I believe. Or just a "what happened to the metallic hydrogen?"
Indeed. Still awfully quiet about repeating the experiment.
Anyone remember the cold fusion announcement way back?
Finally some news on this subject has recently come out from France. Stay tuned to see if it pans out.
@@Thedeepseanomad So? What happened?
When it comes to research projects gone silent either:
Theory 1
They are developing it and have had no significiant Progress to announce
Theory 2
Goverment Cover up , they have done further breakthroughs but are staying silent to avoid others noticing potentialy lucrative technologies
@@nton8057 Theory 3: Technology turned out to be a dead end, wich is kept silent for further funding.
Scott, very good and informative video as always, but the device they used is called "Diamond Anvil Cell" (often just called "DAC" in research literature), not just "Diamond Anvil". A DAC does utilise two diamond anvils usually, although there are special ones that have two smaller diamonds on top of the larger anvils. The highest pressures achieved with this technique go up to 770 GPa (as claimed by a team in 2015), which is much more than the ~350 GPa in the Earth's core, and also much higher than the pressure of ~500 GPa that was reached by Dias and Silvera for the metallic hydrogen publication.
Florian Steindl
Diamond Anvil Cell sounds like a cool band name.
Wouldn't it also be a huge safety headache even if it is meta-stable? You still have a huge tank of explosive material that doesn't need to mix with anything to explode, and that means you are one containment or cooling failure away from everything in general vicinity turning into high temperature plasma...
Exactly, that's the big question.
Black Dew. thats likely the case with any future high energy technology.
Rocket fuel is a safety hazard anyway.
Every successful rocket flight is simply riding a controlled explosion.
Monopropellents like hydrozine, high test peroxide and solid rocket fuels already have to take this sort of thing into account.
Hello this is Hydraulic Press Channel, today we're gonna make Metallic Hydrogen!😀
And here we go...
@@lethargogpeterson4083 holy shit!
The very last video on the channel... xd
Holy S-t! 💥
The last words spoken before the entire property was promptly vaporized.
Hi Scott! Playing Elite Dangerous last night I came across a system discovered by you, no idea why but that made me happy.
The reason metallic hydrogen would be amazing as a superconductor is because it would theoretically be one close to room temperature as opposed to our current superconductors that needs to stay close to 0K
We need a Metallic Hydrogen mod for KSP!
Luckily for you I know C# and Unity ;)
it must explode randomly, and be very expensive. and destroy the engine within 10 seconds of ignition.
edstirling Yeah, For that i'm probably gonna make it have an EXTREME heat output but first I need to learn the API for modding in KSP
Sounds like fun, while you are at it, is a Propane Engine possible? I would make a ton of money on that XD
Propane Man
I'm guessing you would like to label rockets "propane accessories"?
There is a SciFi-movie from the 50s (maybe is was Destination Moon) where the fuel tanks said "atomic hydrogen". They were waaaay ahead of their time :-)
Wow they had Atomic Hydrogen back in the 1950s
@@grummbe Well, in the 1950's "atomic" meant "future".
@@MonkeyJedi99 What means "Future" Now?
@@grummbe Um.. e-something? Maybe quantum.
@@MonkeyJedi99 Yes, you are right. Atomic is to the 20th century as Quantum is to the 21th century.
11:38 Yeah, I was going to say something about that. Although liquid hydrogen has a very high energy density in terms of energy per unit mass, its energy density in terms of energy per unit volume is TERRIBLE. This problem expands to much more than just the fuel tanks, too: you need larger ducts for moving it, larger turbines to pressurize/move it, etc. You actually ad a LOT more mass to your ship and far more inefficiency just by using such an "efficient" fuel as hydrogen. It looks good on paper, if you only look at its energy content, but in practice it's just not practical.
Metallic hydrogen tipped bullets - anti tank .45 ACP
Nuclear hand grenade
Barcel, 45acp already blows up tanks, didnt you watch saving private ryan.
Measly Tigers at best, with this, it could ravage T-90s and Leopards.
Use it to blow up entire aircraft carriers then. Anti-aircraft carrier 9mm rounds.
I'm fairly sure the Tiger got blown up by the allied aircraft seen streaking overhead, rather than by .45acp
Also, a modern shoulder launched anti-tank projectile weighs about 1kg. So even though metallic hydrogen might turn out to be hilariously explosive, we'll probably never see any .45 anti tank rounds. But perhaps 50bmg anti-tank might be possible. In which case traditional MBTs will be obsolete.
Start of the week time for School on RUclips :) - I Literally stop recording just to watch these thanks man :)
Could you make more in depth videos comparing different rocket fuels and their different specific impulses, the pros and cons of each, engineering challenges such as cooling or lack thereof, how cleanly they burn...Etc....
I'd be really into that sort of info comparing long past and retired engines and modern and future designs.
Thank you as usual for breaking this down! Have a great day!
First first reaction when i saw the title: "Oh no, you don't! Not while i'm less than 20 kilometers away". That stuff is tricky enough to handle when you want to make a few atoms of it. Trying to build a pressure vessel big enough to hold tons and tons of it at 495 gigapascals... Oh my...
are you only Scott Manley until then? what are you after?
Flying safe, presumably.
A manley scot
Lol this made me laugh quite hard!
The state of your anatomy while laughing is none of our business.
Scott Godley, of course. Or maybe, Scott Kingley first;)
Diamond. Anvil. It doesn't really get any cooler than that.
Probably most metal name for any science equipment.
Besides that they look pretty basic.
Had one in my hand once.
The cool thing about those and similiar anvils is, that you can create enourm pressure just tighten some screws with your hand because of the small area the pressure focus on.
Although for experiments like these they use something more controllable I assume.
Alexander Sannikov Just clicked on the video and got to the point where it said "diamond anvil": 4:49
Wrong, it doesn't get any hotter than that :)
Kanye West agrees
Scott Manley is so awesome I can watch him talking about anything for hours.
"if we had a lightweight pressure vessel that could hold hydrogen at teraPascals of pressure, it could probably drive a rocket" ✅
Love these actual/theoretical science videos, Scott!
What about having the combustion happen almost externally and controlled by super cooled magnets so that no ridiculously hot matter physically reaches any physical part of the space craft? Somewhat like the VASIMR engine and the fusion chamber of the National Ignition Facility.
Almost impossible to manufacture =/= best rocket fuel ever.
frbe0101
Currently, yes. Not even sure if it is physically possible, either.
its a billion dollar an ounce..... great govt welfare program
Antimatter is the ultimate fuel, black holes are the ultimate engine. But we can't make enough Amat(let alone store it), and we can't even make a black hole.
Bad Beard Bill and of course you'd need cooling rods the length of Route 66 to disperse the extremely intense heat generated during the annihilation of the Amat into a propellant.
Bad Beard Bill injust realized that we as a species created and stored anti matter earlier than metalic hydrogen
Good time of day, Scott Manley. You say that the temperature of the exhaust for a pure metallic hydrogen engine would be around 7,000 K, and that it would melt any existing material. Wouldn't it be possible for us to use magnetic fields to shape the exhaust away from the engine parts, in a way that kind of resembles a plasma thruster?
The hydrogen would have to be ionized for that to work, and your magnetic field would have to generate as much force as the extremely energetic rocket exhaust - in fact, if you could do that, you wouldn't even need a rocket nozzle.
"Hydrogen doesn't like being single"
Well neither do I but here I am, just straight-up metallic hydrogen over here.
Yeah dude, being single is *metal*
'metallic hydrogen' would be a tight poly relationship, not mono....
As always, I love getting the thoughts of someone with some expertise as a way of clearing away any hype that might otherwise trick us plebs.
Loving these rocket focused science videos. Keep it up Scott!!
Won't this new "fuel" be about 1,000,000 as expensive to manufacture and about 1,000,000 as likely to lead to massive death and destruction? Maybe we'll see this in common use in a few centuries, who knows.
Brad Gefroh: The word your looking for is "fun."
The Jebedia Kerman school of fun, eh?
Brad Gefroh
Most new materials start as expensive, like nylon, but get cheap quickly.
New materials don't necessarily get cheap, or even that much cheaper. For example, monoisomeric medicine have been known for as long as we have known of medical chemistry and isomeric compounds. Isomeric molecules have identical contents but are different in shape, which makes them extremely hard to separate with traditional chemical processes and requires inefficient and expensive separation methods.
However, they're very useful in certain medical needs. Cisplatin is a common and effective chemotherapy drug, but its isomeric counterpart, transplatin, is medically useless. In order for the chemotherapy to work, the cisplatin must be very pure, and producing it is still almost as expensive as it has ever been.
Then there are of course unstable substances which will always need specialized equipment to produce and can't effectively be stored for any period of time. For example certain isotopes of Polonium can only be produced in 3 most advanced nuclear physics laboratories in the world, 2 of them in Russia and 1 in USA. Materials like these will always be extremely expensive to acquire in any real quantities.
Brad Gefroh: You know it! :D
At 8:20 or so, in the talk about metalic Hydrogen being Meta-stabile, I believe that a team at Sandia National Labs determined decades ago that it was not.
calculated, not determined.
Anyone remember when Scott's stream got hijacked about a year ago?
Those pics ;)
EchoTheDragon I remember!
nope, is there any recording of it online?
I don't think you want to see it....
what was it?
I bet it can even melt steel beams
Vapourise steel beams.
rocket fuel can vapourise steel beams
Parzival Dank memes can melt steel beams
The high exhaust gas velocities account for object falling out of windows faster than a free fall too. =) Think Scott either ignored or missed the conspiracy here.
PULL IT
I thought antimatter was the best rocket fuel... Seriously though, even without the extra ISP over liquid Hydrogen, this new fuel would have the advantage of being more dense, and avoid the cryogenic requirement - that alone is really cool.
Yes, it is, but producing and storing antimatter is way harder than producing and storing metalic hydrogen, and when they may be metalic-hydrogen rockets in the next 30 years or so, building functional antimatter rocket may take another century or even more.
Do you have any idea how much energy is lost from antimatter annihalation in the form of neutrinos.
Actually I don't know how much energy is lost to neutrinos - you should make a video about that :-)
Scott Manley about a half?
Does antimatter actually annihalates when it interacts with DIFFERENT matter particle types?
Well done Scott, very interesting as always. This is my favourite channel by far, I love watching these "science series" videos. KSP brought me here, but there are so many other good reasons that keep me here. Always looking forward to what you upload next...
There's a principle in explosives that "bang per pound" (or kg) is useless if the stuff can't be controlled. Well, it's true of rocket propellants, too!
Once you solve the problems of producing and containing the substance, you then still have to figure out how to make dead certain that it will go off when you want it to, and not when you don't!
So for metallic H, those are some tall hurdles, but if they *could* be surmounted - oh, boy!!
Thanks, Scott; there's some great material here!
Fred
I know I am a child when posting this. But I just can't help it. 4:23
We all thought about it
Kevin Verstegen Tou are not the only one...
I call my penis “The Diamond Anvil”
Glad you directed me back to that gesture which I innocently interpreted as a monatomic hydrogen compressor at the time.
Aaaaaaaaaaaah oooooh yuh yaaaaas
You could run it at full temperature if you had a magnetic nozzle.
electromagnetic
normal magnets cang
cant*
Turns out we won't see any rockets running on metallic hydrogen or antimatter anytime soon.
Mr. Scott, you have outstanding skill to explain things, keep going please.
I love how chemistry class helps me actually understand what he is saying
Go get a PDF of 'Ignition!', you'll have a blast. A history of rocket propellant research.
You spared no expense making this video.
Forget rocket fuel. I want to hear Sir Manley compare, contrast, and rate the collective omnibus of 90's techno bands.
'Diamond Anvil' is the name of my rock band
Could we make a rocket that first generates thrust by combining separate hydrogen atoms followed by generating thrust using oxygen and dihydrogen?
If you do the math that leads to a lower specific impulse (higher thrust though)
Scott, what about Neutrino Rockets? Are those more feasible than metallic hydrogen ones?
HAha, my mighty (but likely not actually working, and probably completely overhyped) reactionless EM-drive pwns your silly neutrino drive! Now watch me attach it to a lever and produce torque from nothing! Watch my kinetic energy output/energy input ratio soar as it gains speed, until l reach efficiency coefficients >1
I spit at conservation of momentum! I spit at conservation of angular momentum! I spit at thermodynamics! Bet you and your stupid neutrino drive feel stupid now!
EM-drive master race!
How would you store Neutrinos?? They are the very definition of low interaction particles: no container can hold them and any electromagnetic containment would fail since they have no charge and no magnetic moment.... So no, Neutrino Rockets are not a good idea.
And that's just perfect for SSTO. You use LOX as both cooling agent and additional energy source on takeoff to generate more thrust and then switch to LH2 for cooling to generate more ISP.
I come from the future when another KSP2 trailer was released. What you can do is put cesium into the metallic hydrogen to allow it to be affected by magnets. Then, using a rocket nozzle made of concentric electromagnetic rings, you could create a rocket nozzle for the metallic hydrogen, without ever having your rocket come into direct contact with the bulk of the 7000K temperatures.
So...
Basically a metal Hydrogen would let us build Hydrogen SRBs?
Павел Жданов They'd be monopropellant SRBs
@HO LAM YIU less then 10 seconds lol
Nice. I had read about this earlier today and now get the treat of hearing Manley's take on it. ^
Among the things you’ll probably never hear: “Oops, I dropped the metallic hydrogen...”
You might hear it. Once
Excellent discussion, I really enjoyed this topic.
WHAT goes through all that plumbing, requires all that plumbing!
7:20 In KSP 2 it seems like we'll find out how awesome a metallic hydrogen engine would be!
I think it's the other way around. Use the metallic hydrogen like nitrous in a conventional liquid hydrogen engine. Instead of using liquid hydrogen to cool a metallic hydrogen engine. Or maybe it's basically the same regardless of how you look at it. Either way, if we can improve (more efficient) exciting technology with it then that would be great.
Ok, someone hit up Applied Science, time to make some metallic hydrogen
Well, leaving aside how much energy you could get from it if it was stable with a combination of temperature or pressure we could maintain in a container we shipped to space, wouldn't you still just ship oxygen along for another huge chemical energy boost with the hot and high-pressure hydrogen gas we suddenly have in our possession? Even if liquid oxygen is relatively heavy it should still be worth it being a phase of the engine... which if I were naming it I'd probably call a ruminant engine.
Hey Scott, do you think there would be a benefit to having a secondary engine after the metallic hydrogen engine that combines liquid oxygen with the hydrogen gas exhaust of the metallic engine and combusts those as well? It seems silly to even consider adding that much complexity to the design since a metallic hydrogen engine would already be so complex, and a metallic hydrogen engine would already be so much more powerful than a liquid oxygen hydrogren rocket. However it occurred to me that the exhaust product of the metallic hydrogen engine is one component of our current most efficient rocket fuel. I guess you'd have to combust the hydrogen and oxygen without decreasing the velocity of the H2 exhaust? It just seemed like an interesting thought experiment, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
Loving the recent science videos Scott, keep it coming please
If you can mass produce Metallic Hydrogen, then i guess you could also make Metallic Oxygen? Would combining those two lower the temperature in the engine?
You convinced me that this is a bad idea when I heard "The diamonds shatter"
2:11 "That's like... 50 times the energy of TNT... "
Scott's face... My face... And more than likely everyone else interested enough to watch this videos face lights up
hehehehehe
It's like the day I found out how much more I could get out of my sterling engine with Petrol then alcohol xD
excitement in the air people!!!
I've also heard that metallic hydrogen, if it does turn out to be stable, could be an excellent superconductor.
What if we used Nitrogen instead of Hydrogen? Wouldn't the bonds release a lot more energy?
Baran Hekimoglu per atom, yes. Per mass, not even close (N about 7 times more heavy per Atom)
It's the energy to mass ratio that's really important.
Might not be very good for rocket fuel but they do make great explosives.
Things that make an Azidoazide azide explode:
Moving it
Touching it
Dispersing it in solution
Leaving it undisturbed on a glass plate
Exposing it to a bright light
Exposing it to X-Rays
Putting it to a Spectrometer
Turning on the Spectrometer
Absolutely nothing...
Poes Law scishow references are great
If you want mass amounts of acid rain on Earth go ahead, but personally it sounds like a hellscape (Use it in space but no in Earth's atmosphere).
And thanks for all your videos. I just discovered your channel.it feels like I just bought a storage unit filled with treasure at an auction
Metalic hydrogen would behave as a high explosive. Take nitro glycerine for example: it gets a big part of its energy by recombining the diatomic Nitrogen atoms in to N(2) with their super strong triple bonds. Recombining H(2) in solid metalic hydrogen would produce a similar high velocity energy shockwave through the solid and it would "rapidly decompose" - i.e. not combust in any controllable manner. It would make one hell of a super weapon though, without all the drawbacks that come with Nukes.
Such a great series from a person who has a great personality and wealth of knowledge and ability. This is the kind of stuff I'm on youtube and looking for!
Why not cooling the chamber with liquid oxygen? It can then pumped in the engine nozzle to be used like an 'afterburner', like in a LANTR
I keep seeing comments about metallic hydrogen being 1 billion dollars per ounce. Y'all are missing the point, guys. Demonstrate that it's physically possible first, then it just becomes an engineering problem. If we know it's possible, then we can start creating machines and manufacturing techniques to produce it in larger quantities and for less money, and we can figure out how to store it, etc.
In fact, I'd wager we could probably get costs down to as little as $10 million per ounce! See? Totally doable
great video. off topic but can you remaster your old ksp videos? just like a simple tutorial like you used to do on launching, docking and landing. that sort of stuff. im a master at the game but i still enjoy watching ksp videos. they always put me in the mood to play. thankyou
Great discussion as always.
I still look at chemical rockets as very old school, and am fascinated with gravity/anti-gravity propulsion as the newest most effective way to get around this universe.
I know,i know...the fact that we need to generate a great deal of energy,that is not feasible as yet sets me thinking that Bob Lazar has the best conceptual proposal of using gravity waves.
I am reading a great book titled Ignition! by John D. Clark ,most of you are probably familiar with.
Working as an industrial chemist ,I find it very enlightening.
Chemical rockets are still really just horse and buggy attempts to get us off this planet.
Hope springs eternal.
So its just efficient energy storage.. like poor man's antimatter?
Vladimir Akopyan
Everything is some sort of energy storage, really. "Poor man's" is highly subjective. "Different" would be better.
Well, antimatter would be massively more expensive to produce and contain, and release massively more energy per unit of mass. By those standards, the metallic hydrogen would be "poor mans antimatter".
It's a bit more sane material for now though, we haven't been able to produce any significant amounts of antimatter, and containing it has obviously been ridiculously hard mission.
Antimatter would be anything but efficient. It would require enormous magnetic fields to store safely, and those take energy to maintain. and even then magenetically neutral particlese can infultrate the contaimentunit.
Could you use a magnetic containment instead of a physical one for the combustion chamber? That might be a work around for the high temperatures instead of cooling it
Could you contain the metallic hydrogen reaction in a magnetic field, similarly to how fusion reaction is contained in a fusion reactor.
rpatto92 you can hold oxygen in a magnetic field
rpatto92 also at around 4:20 He says that
Ah you misunderstood. I didn't mean in order to create metallic hydrogen, I meant in order to contain the combustion for use in a rocket.
The problem is, the gas you'd create doesn't have any charge. I don't think. Whatever the case, you can't use magnetic fields to contain materials with no charge.
QuantumSeanyGlass Iron. Your argument is invalid.
Forget rockets, I'm talking about a new class of top fuel drag racing!!
Any update? After five years I suppose this had been a false alarm
you were the first I thought of to ask about Metallic Hydrogen
I paused the video at 3:06 and Scott looks way too much like a Bond villain
The Professor "laser"
The Professor
He expects you to die.
Concentrating on Scott's discussion actually knocks me out. I wake up drooling on my keyboard. I would suggest an experiment with a liquid nitro cooler at the end of a centrofuge-like magnetically reinforced containment chamber; put the hydrogen in; either spin it or fire it into Mars and see what you get.
i wonder what a metalic "hydrogen bomb" would be like...
You mean a chemical H bomb rather than the atomic one? Wimpy, compared to its atomic sibling, but still pretty damn scary.
o0alessandro0o You talking shit
Shit shit shit shit. That was talking shit.
The other one was talking physics and chemistry. Know the difference, at least on this channel.
what i was thinking
That would be the most powerful conventional weapon ever created.
Perfect video, very informative, you get to the point, and use pictures to help viewer understand.
You just earned a subscriber. 🙂
Would metallic hydrogen be a liquid or a solid at room temperature?
it would be gas
Stupid RUclips notification told me about this vid 18 HOURS after you posted it. =P
If its metallic/conductive, is magnetic containment an option?
Serah Wint
It's not ferrous, so I would say 'no'. For example, stainless steel (or pennies, or US quarters) won't attract a magnet. Magnetic confinement works with plasma, which is electrically conductive, and highly charged, making it susceptible to magnetic confinement. I don't think long term confinement of plasma has ever been achieved, either.
They're hoping to get up to 8 minutes or so of continuous fusion with the biggest experimental reactor being built, which will only possibly lead to commercial viability of a fusion power plant by ~30 years from now. This depends on material science discovery required, and increased confinement pressure, and duration of maintained confinement.
Oxygen is affected by magnets, not sure thats a definative "no, it wont be magnetically contained"
After it reacted in the engine it wouldn't be metallic anymore. But at 7000K it might be a plasma? So maybe still yes?
maybe, if youve got a magnetic field powerful enough for the hydrogen to be contained in.
It sounds like the issue is the energy consumption of your magnets. Probably superconductors so you'd need to cryogenically cool them constantly, absorbing all the heat from the propellant. Easiest way to do that is.. a tank of liquid hydrogen that you run through them and allow to boil, then mix with the propellant to cool it further. That's back to what Scott suggested, although it might end up being more efficient.
Absolutely badass vinyl collection Scott!
why arent they using osmium as an anvil? that stuff is insanely dense, and i believe that it does not react with hydrogen. please forgive me if i said anything dumb, i had only 1 year of physics/chemistry when i was 15...
love to learn from you, really great vids btw
Agnus Mason Just had a look and its only got a mohs hardness of 7 - density isn't what they need I think, its the hardness.
ANameThatIsn'tMyOwn bugger XD
Its alright for not knowing, that's why people ask questions. None of us are material scientists so don't worry, the internet is full of bad things but Scott's channel is safe (for the time being)
Just for clarification, density is the amount of mass per volume, while hardness is a material's ability to resist a physical change in shape (scratching, crushing, cracking) that is related to the strength of atomic bonds. I might be wrong about hardness though.
Why
"Hardness is a measure of how resistant solidmatter is to various kinds of permanent shape change when a compressive force is applied."
Woaw...i just heared about the paper yesterday and then i see it showing up here too...you explained it really good!
So we either discovered metallic hydrogen... or aluminum.
Hey, one of those things is pretty exciting!
Metallic hydrogen also has its uses of course.
Hey scott, thanks for teaching me about the Z-Machine.
So much science around the world.. Shame it isn't talked about more!
If metallic Hydrogen is meta stable why haven't they tested the stuff in the anvil to determine what it actually is?
Because they lost the sample when the anvil later shattered.
I think you have really earned my subscription every video i've watched so far has been interesting.
As an American, my first thought, "thatd be one hell of a bomb"
It probably keeps the world peaceful if the people who run Russia, China, North Korea, Iran etc know that if they start shit Americans will kill them in large numbers and probably in a way which is scientifically and technologically very impressive.
Metallic hydrogen is hi lighted in the NASA Technology Roadmaps, though in 2015 they placed it in TRL 1. Good to see it moving towards feasibility.
Is metallic hydrogen a fuel or an energy transport system?
fuel
both
seems to be fuel.
Yes.
What is a fuel if not a means of transporting energy?
Thank you very much Mr Manley. Very interesting to listen to your explanation !
Do a video about your record collection.
VintageLJ
Or not
Something about a scottish mans voice talking about rocket science is super calming. Kids want a bed time story heres uncle Scott to read you history of rocket fuels.
"the exhaust produced would be 7000 Kevin *burns atmosphere earth turns into mars* *oops*
Cool video, I may have not understood half of what you were saying but still intriguing
Me from the future that uses antimatter
Me from the far future that uses wormholes
I wonder if cooling it with LOX rather that LH would be better. You'd get a little more energy, but the exhaust gas would be a lot heavier.
Scott, have you ever considered writing an SF novel? I bet you would come up with an awesome story.
Heavy is bad for exhaust gasses. The same energy per kilogram is the same energy over less particles, which means higher temperature.
Let's hope Samsung doesn't use this in their phones.
Hey buddy been watching you since KSP was first launched - love this vid. Keep up the great work Scott. God Bless
Most powerful fuel?
Isn't the Orion Nuclear Pulse rocket more powerful than this?
(also, 666th comment)
Lol Scott accidentally said “clit” near the end of the video XD. But in all seriousness it seems like cracking metallic hydrogen is similar to cracking nuclear fusion. Both of these intense energy sources come down to the temperature and pressure of hydrogen... great video!
Insert lame "FIRST! 11!!" here.