The reason it burned with so much soot was it was a deliberately fuel rich mixture. If they ran the engines at perfect stoichiometric ratios, they would have melted. And some of the soot is from the turbopump. And the ratio could be changed to "throttle" the engine via the engines' "Propellant Utilization" valves. (It's not actually throttling, but had a similar thrust modulating effect . )
Came here to make this same comment. Black exhaust you see at ignition is turbopump spinning up. Then in the main exhaust plume you can see the color change between the turbopump exhaust and combustion chamber exhaust.
my understanding was that most of the black soot you see is actually the exhaust of the fuel-rich gas generator being used as film cooling inside the nozzle of the main engine, not the main engine running below stoichiometric balance. Like the main combustion chamber they run hot but then to stop the throat of the nozzle from melting they flow the relatively cool exhaust from the gas generator powering the propellent pumps between the walls of the nozzle and the hot gas from the main combustion chamber
A note about sooty rocket exhaust - a few times you talk about how sooty rp1 is and at the same time show a bunch of relatively dark black flecked exhaust from a Saturn five launch. Yes the combustion is relatively incomplete which is why we can see the yellow flame but it isn’t like what you show in these clips. That part of the exhaust comes from film cooling, where they purposely ran fuel rich mixture around the outside of the nozzle to keep it from overheating.
Thank you, a very important detail there. Although he isn't wrong about the soot, the example (at least for someone who knows more deeply what's going on) was poorly chosen. It does also still get a point across.
A video for those more interested in film cooling, and many other cooling options that have been developed for rocket engine nozzles: ruclips.net/video/he_BL6Q5u1Y/видео.html
@@pseudotasuki Even though the camera setting may make it look darker, it really is a almost black smoke, you can see this nicely with the merlin enigine testfires, its a different engine, but the same cycle type
Except the critical equation isn't balanced and the hydrogen isn't represented correctly. It makes it very difficult to even understand his point about producing enough oxygen.
My teacher in airframe electrical, Jerry Adams said "I will teach at the level of the best student in the class.It wasn't my best subject but I wonder if he was mostly assigning things and not knowing.I was curious about his use of "device when describing anything electrical.I looked the definition up and told him his usage was incorrect.He acted insulted but I passed.
Methane LOX is very clean. It also allows for the use of co-axial fuel tanks where the LOX tank is surrounded by the Methane tank. This creates a very strong and efficient structure while decreasing the weight of the LOX tank.
But I think its also very dangerous. If the tank somehow leaked just a few of those gases together, Elon Musk will have to face Colombia disaster happened somewhere between Mars and Earth
I can thoroughly recommend reading “ignition!”, it is absolutely packed with information and they should make a film of his career as a rocket propellant expert. They even used liquid mercury once as a propellant. He also talks about using chlorine triflouride (which actually burns concrete on contact!) as a propellant too, among myriads of other types.
Chlorine Trifluoride? Bafwa! That is the most potent oxidizer ever. I hear a Chlorine Trifluoride tank ruptured and caused a meter of cement pavement and dirt to burn for six hours.... It's remarkably hard to contain it, I think it requires stainless steel tank... But one minor defect in the tank and it burns right through!!!
@@kayakMike1000 As a virologist we'd need to store our cell lines in liquid nitrogen, so as you decant LN2 from one flask to another, liquid oxygen drips off the metal transfer tube. One of the engineer's tricks was to collect the LO2, take a mouthful and blow it through a lit cigarette. Instant flamethrower! We're a bit more safety conscious nowadays!
The FOOF and ozone chapters were interesting too, actually the whole book was very enjoyable. I should really take the time to read through it again sometime soon. Many substances that were tried seem a bit insane to even want to work with. Dimethyl mercury also vaguely stands out as one of the mad things they experimented with at one point. The mystery of disappearing ethanol fuel and happy researchers + sailors was funny too. Even after adding things to make it not fit for consumption, I was kinda curious how often that went wrong and if saving it from combustion ever went beyond just distilling it again.
@@davidlloyd3116 Totally off-topic but we're here now - I used to have fun working in the lab as well, also a virologist. LN2 was fun as was dry ice. We'd get reagents shipped on dry ice, I used to put it into one of the big sinks and blast the high pressure hot tap on it and fill the room with billowing clouds of water vapour and co2. probably quite dangerous but it's denser than air and sinks. Also using LN2 to clean the lab floor. when you pour it out of a dewar onto the floor it scoots along and picks up any dust as it bobbles about in the Leidenfrost effect. One weekend I was working and took a bottle of fresh lemonade with me, I put it in a bowl with some dry ice to make a sorbet, but it ended up fizzy, I should really have used liquid nitrogen. One of my biggest regrets is when I got my mate a job there and was showing him the prep room. there was a bottle of concentrated HCl 37% I told him it smelt vinegary expecting him to do the proper scientist sniff and waft some towards your nose with your hand, but he just put his nose over the bottle and huffed. It stung his nose and he coughed out a cloud of hydrogen chloride gas. not particularly pleasant, but he was not permanently harmed.
Another benefit of methane is that since it has a similar boiling temperature as oxygen, not only can they use similar infrastructure, they can also be stored right next to each other in the rocket with minimal insulation which is not possible with hydrogen and oxygen or kerosene and oxygen, since the differences in the boiling point for those liquids is too much. This save space, simplifies components, and saves on the mass of systems within the ship to cool the propellants since you can use one system instead of two separate ones. All of that really helps when you want to mass produce those systems and tanks for as cheaply as possible.
Isn't one of the advantages of an LH2/LOX with a common bulkhead that the temperature difference creates a vacuum within the bulkhead and thus insulates even further?
By the way that 400C reaction temperature for the Sabatier process is about 200C below the operating temperature of the MSR built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Most Solar Thermal systems using molten salts operate around 600C as well, so there are several options for cheap thermal energy to run the reaction.
But it is Nuclear, and people don't want to acknowledge there are distinctions and places it can work meaning Politicians will fan the flames on why we should not bother.
The darker exhaust on the Saturn launch is because there is fuel sprayed down the sided of the nozzle to provide cooling. Not all kerosene rocket exhausts look as dark as that.
"We have been given the scientific knowledge, the technical ability and the materials to pursue the exploration of the universe. To ignore these great resources, will be a corruption of a God-given ability" I just love this opening address ❤️
It's not true. Not everything that man has the ability to do, should be done. Jesus had the ability to make stones into loaves of bread, in the wilderness of temptation. He wouldn't do it, because that is not what God put Him on earth for. As a race, we face destruction from many sources: war, environment, economic. Every time a new invention comes out, we manage to turn it into something that hurtles our race towards extinction. We are not fit to colonize other worlds until we solve our own problems at home.
@@kevinmaher7687 And yes, that's Wernher Von Braun, one of the Nazis that the USA just happen to forgive and forget that he was a war criminal and instrumental in the V1 and V2 bombing of the UK. But hey... so what eh, as long as he mentions god and lays the foundation of the USA's rocket program.
@@kevinmaher7687 Von Braun, disciple of Oberth (Germany). Count also Tsiolkovsky and Korolev in the east, Esnault-Pelterie in France and Goddard in the west. 💫🚀 Ad Astra !!
Soviets had already developed mathalox rocket engines : RD-0162, RD-0141 & RD-0143, RD-183 & RD-185. Unfortunately, they never flew on a real rocket, only static fires had been conducted.
@@animeee82 the SOVIETS had good (VERY good) rockets. The russians are still using rockets developed 60 years ago, and their native russian designs (Angara) are plagued with problems. And Russian R7 variants are having more and more problems as the ex-soviets retire from the program.
That is the Saturn V, but the Atlas V is really good too. Ares V was going to be great, like SON OF SATURN V great. Titan V would have been great, but Delta and Atlas were favored over Titan. Titan V would have been a hydrolox system instead of aerozene-50/N2O4, and would have had first and second stage extensions, by ten feet each. Possibly even diameter increases, perhaps to 15 feet on the first stage, much like the Titan-based Barbarian proposals. Delta V (Not delta-v) is more or less what Vulcan will be. Vulcan could perhaps be Atlas VI.
my favourite shot of an engine firing was a slowmo shot of space shuttle engine test where the outer rim of the rocket bell had icicles on it from the super cold fuel flowing through it to cool it down, and right next to those icicles was the engine firing full throttle with a bunch of clear blue exhaust. The duality of super cold right next to almost surface of the sun hot, was super cool, and really shows just how much insane engineering goes into making these things that allows them to achieve that.
Great video. Thank you for the explanation of the importance of Discovery and Space. People don't know the massive impact of innovation driven by discovery and just trying to understand our universe.
I see a couple of errors here: -1 sometimes hydrigen is referred to as H, while it is H2, as correctly reported sometimes. Some equations are also wrong, such as the one at 9:11 4H2O → 4H2 + 2O2, then 4H2 + CO2 → 2H2O + CH4, but these are kinda minor imprecision. -2 coking in the engines is not much caused by long chain hydrocarbons, rather by alkenes and aromatic hydrocarbons, which are naturally present in kerosene. RP-1 is a highly refined kerosene that eliminates much of the olefins and aromatics, but as of my understanding it's impossible to get rid of 100% of them. -3 The black soot you see at the exhaust of Saturn 5's F-1 engine is not caused by poorly burned fuel, but from fully unburned fuel that was used as nozzle coolant. This fuel was unburned, because it was just for cooling, so a large formation of soot is expected. -4 You wouldn't want to convert captured CO2 back into methane because in order to do this you would need at least the same amount of energy that was obtained by burning the hydrocarbon that generated it, rendering the whole process useless. Of course, you can store it and revert it back to hydrocarbon when you have overproduction of renewables, but this is still not really recommended. The best we can do with captured CO2, as for now, is just to bury it underground and leave it there forever, using something like zeolytes or MOFs to stabilize it. Think of these as sort of a CO2 sponges. Anyways, very interesting video.
Yeah I am surprised more people didn't catch this...I was counting my moles and they didn’t add up! Thanks for also the very detailed add'l info 👌Of course making CO2 into fuel is not a great idea in and of itself, but unfortunately there's not market for CCS currently. No one will pay for something you can't use...even if it will save civilization 🙄. So to create (kickstart) the market, rocket use is a much better idea than allowing oil companies to use it as a crutch.
@12:17 did you find an error in the final eqn for the 'Hydrogen Transport' final eqn too? Requiring 2 moles O2 for every 1 of CH4), I get: 5CO2 + 4H2 -> 4CO + 2H2O +CH4 + 2O2 compared to video: 3CO2 + 6H2 -> CH4 + 2CO + 4H2O . Both eqns are balanced...but since the product oxygen (needed for subsequent combustion) is omitted in the products I think the molar coefficients in the video are in error. Is this correct?
well than someone have to tell Elon that. ... lol. so u just use solar to convert. The whole point of "reusable" is to "generate" fuel on mars and fly back. In other words u have to find something that u can burn in a rocket motor, its no matter what u have to do for that. As long as it works.
@@mariusjansen5345 This first Mars mission is a one-way trip; they aren't coming back. What would be the point of bringing them back? They are going there to establish a beach-head and to survive for as long as they can, ensuring the next wave has a head-start. I'd love to see the psychological tests that were done on the people that were selected.
Something to digest for those that doubt the practical merit of investing time and resources into this strategy may find of benefit: dozens and more new technologies are stumbled upon through projects like this, where new methods have to be developed to tackle problems that can have additional and more widespread benefit than the primary topic of study ever envisioned. I myself often run into this, where I started on one specific target, and through the development to get the primary idea off the ground, end up developing 5 or 6 new application ideas along the way which likely have more practical and widespread use then that initial project ever could encompass by itself; occasionally you stumble onto something so magnificent that switching to one of those accidental discoveries is worth abandoning or postponing the first project because of said possibilities!
Amazing work! I always throughly enjoy watching these videos. You do an excellent job discussing technical information in a manner that keeps engineers like us entertained while also explaining what it means to people who are less familiar with the subject matter. Keep it up!
The world's first rocket engine designed to be reusable- the Rocketdyne RS-25, is a liquid hydrogen/ liquid oxygen engine. I'd love to know how hydrogenization affected the engine. As I recall, the engine was designed for 25 launches. As I understand it, three of the four RS-25's being used for Artemis 1 are leftover, flight used shuttle engines
The amount of research to create this video is amazing! Reminding that it is not only googling the subject, he (and his team?) had thousands of hours studying a lot to even understand and relay the subject properly. Excellent video. Congratulations!
Great video! I like everything your channel puts out. But as an engineer myself, I just want to make a correction about impulse. It doesn’t represent total energy released. In this case it represents total momentum gained by the rocket due to the fuel.
Sure @@ronjon7942 . Impulse is indeed the area under a force vs time curve like the one in the video. This is also equal to change in momentum over the time the force is being applied. To see why, you'd need to integrate force and the answer would be equal to the final momentum minus the initial momentum (I'll put the math at the end of my post). So fundamentally, the impulse represents the total increase in momentum due to an applied force. That increase in momentum is related to the energy gained, but it's not a direct relationship so we can't say the area under the curve represents the energy gained. You can calculate the area under the curve by taking the integral of the force function f(t) with respect to t over some initial time to a final time: ∫f(t)dt. Newton’s second law defines force as, f(t)=ma=m(dv/dt) where m, a, and v are mass, acceleration, and velocity respectively (dv/dt is the derivative of velocity which is equal to acceleration). So the integral becomes, ∫(dmv/dt)dt=∆(mv). This result is equal to change in momentum since momentum is defined as P=mv. On the other hand, energy gained by the rocket, due to the fuel alone, is equal to the rocket's change in kinetic energy (a measure of energy associated with an object’s speed). Change in kinetic energy is ∆(0.5mv^2) which you can see is similar to momentum, but the relationship is quadratic so it will not be directly related to impulse. Instead, increasing the area under the curve will quadratically increase the amount of energy the fuel provides to the rocket. I know that’s a lot so feel free to ask any follow-ups.
@@VecheslavNovikov That's only true for a rocket engine thought, for a jet engine the slower you throw the air the more efficient you are because you are pushing an external mass and the slower you throw it the more mass you are pushing against.
@@VecheslavNovikov Specific impulse is a unit of momentum per kg of fuel so if the exhaust mass and the fuel mass are the same like in a rocket engine it's just an unit of speed. But instead of using newtons they used kilogram force. So you have to multiply it by 9.81 to convert kgF to N and get a speed in m/s
00:19 that ignition onrush of gasses that get sucked back in by the negative pressure zone/vacuum created by the rapid exhaust leaving the chamber always tickles me. Gas goes up and reverses, so simple yet wonderful.
I’ve a better feel for specific impulse after watching this. Viewing total impulse as the area under the total thrust curve really helped. Maybe after watching this a few times will help solidify specific impulse for me. At any rate, I found this video to be the best description of the metric to date. If anyone has links to links that you found helpful, I’d appreciate it. Suppose I could (gasp) search RUclips or DDG….
ISRU oxygen on Mars is relatively easy because we can extract it chemically from CO2. ISRU methane is a lot, lot harder. Its not the chemical engineering, but rather its the industrial scale mining. And with ecosystem of assembly, refuelling, maintenance and repair robots that would be needed to mine the dirt, from which to extract the water. And the MW class power supply and distribution system. Fortunately, in a realistic Mars exploration mission, the quantity of methane needed is small - single digit tonnes of methane per ascent. So it makes more sense to import methane to Mars and only produce the oxygen locally. After all, the oxygen component is 78 percent of the propellant.
The whole Mars thing is just to create hype is not meant to be realistic or fool anyone but to rich investors that can't come up with something else to through the money at.
@@bigcauc7530 don't bother asking them. You are looking at the modern equivalent to the news paper that published a story about how man would not fly in 1000 years. Only to have the Wright bros do it within the next month.
Sounds like they are gonna need an SMR to power this. Good thing that is on the horizon too. The engineering challenges are there but with enough effort its possible.
Mars would make a great base for mining asteroids in the asteroid belt and in Jupiter's L-3 and L-4 positions. There's possibly more hydrocarbons and water on these astroids as well.
Why, though? The extra complexity of lining up orbits for a "gas station", so to speak, could delay a mission for years and would add significantly to delta-V requirements as you suddenly have to stop around a third body and work its launch windows into the equations. Plus, we're likely a century or more before such things become economically viable as the moon and other near-earth objects will be able to provide resources to sate growing terran demand much quicker and at a much lower cost.
My favorite interest in the space industry is in the launching and recovery process. Things are still primitive and the years of practical experience is beginning to pay off, still have a lot of room for evolution in both realms. Carry on.
110% on closing the carbon cycle. Storage of energy by means of liquid production will be essential long term. Cheap hydrogen production is something the oil industry can actually help with; in situ hydrogen production (leaving the carbon trapped down hole) is something that can be done, ideally powered by renewables, and pipelines could be retrofitted to allow transport. We just need the will to do it.
Finding "the will" is the hardest part of the equation, it requires good governance, building concensus, effective politicians and buy-in from both investors and the public. If it was so easy then we could have already insulated our homes, reduced our meat consumption, bought smaller cars to drive on cyclist friendly roads. We have most of the answers already, the faith in future, uncertain and often specious technological solutions can only hold us back from taking mundane but necessary steps now. I know this attitude is less exciting, less aspirational and makes for less interesting RUclips videos (though "Technology Connections" might beg to differ), but it does provide a practical way forward.
It is not just a matter of having the will to build the infrastructure. The technologies for cost effective hydrogen production, though improving, are still at the demonstration stage at best. Effort must continue on the R&D front, and government can support that. This is perhaps one area where our will must be focused right now. Gen IV nuclear reactors will also be so safe that I see no distinction between them and renewables. We should have no preference between the two; they will both have their contributions to give.
@@JamesGriffinT Nothing stopping 99% of people going vegan today. We millions of vegans have been vegan for centuries. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has prevented the needless breeding and murder of a billion animals by getting millions to go vegan.
Hydrogen is too large and reactive to be a fuel. In order to transport and use it, it needs to be bonded to something like a carbon atom. Otherwise the metals and plastics used as pipelines and storage containers would leak right away. It is not a matter of will, it is a matter of chemistry. It makes no sense chemically or from an energy efficiency standpoint. Hydrogen is too large and volatile on its own
This was a great video, nicely summarizing the general idea. Also I highly recommened the book Ignition! even if you don't understand chemistry it is still a fun read that explains a lot about propellants and how we settled on fuels that are used most.
GOD'S STANDARD FOR HEAVEN IS PERFECTION AND ONLY JESUS (THE SON OF GOD/GOD IN THE FLESH) LIVED THAT PERFECT LIFE! HE LAID DOWN HIS LIFE & TOOK THE WRATH OF THE FATHER ON THE CROSS FOR YOUR SINS! GOD IS JUST SO HE MUST PUNISH SIN & HE IS HOLY SO NO SIN CAN ENTER HIS KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. IF YOU ARE IN CHRIST ON JUDGEMENT DAY GOD WILL SEE YOU AS HIS PERFECT SON (SINLESS SINCE YOUR SINS ARE COVERED BY JESUS' OFFERING). YOU CAN ALSO CHOOSE TO REJECT JESUS' GIFT/SACRIFICE & PAY FOR YOUR OWN SIN WITH DEATH (HELL) BUT THAT SEEMS PRETTY FOOLISH! GOD SEES & HEARS EVERYTHING YOU HAVE SAID & DONE. YOU WONT WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH HIM & YOU CANT DEFEND ANY OF YOUR SINS TO HIM. YOU'RE NOT A GOOD PERSON, I'M NOT A GOOD PERSON... ONLY GOD IS GOOD! WE'RE ALL GUILTY WITHOUT ACCEPTING JESUS' SACRIFICE FOR OUR SINS! MUHAMMAD DIDN'T DIE FOR YOUR SINS, BUDDHA DIDN'T DIE FOR YOUR SINS, NO PASTOR/NO PRIEST/NO SAINT/NO ANCESTOR DIED FOR YOUR SINS, MARY DIDN'T, THE POPE DIDN'T EITHER, NO IDOLS OR FALSE gods DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO MUSICIAN OR CELEBRITY DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO INFLUENCER OR RUclips STAR DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO SCIENTIST OR POLITICIAN DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO ATHLETE OR ACTOR DIED FOR YOUR SINS! STOP IDOLIZING & WORSHIPING THESE PEOPLE! JESUS CHRIST ALONE DIED FOR YOUR SINS & WAS RESURRECTED FROM THE GRAVE! HE IS ALIVE & COMING BACK VERY VERY SOON WITH JUDGEMENT (THESE ARE END TIMES)! PREPARE YOURSELVES, TURN FROM SIN & RUN TO JESUS! HE KNOWS YOUR PAIN & TROUBLES, HE WANTS TO HEAL & RESTORE YOU! TALK TO HIM LIKE A BEST FRIEND! ASK HIM TO REVEAL HIMSELF TO YOU & HELP YOU TO BELIEVE IF YOU DOUBT! DON'T WAIT TO CRY OUT! NO ONE IS PROMISED TOMORROW! HE LONGS FOR YOU TO INVITE HIM IN, HE LOVES YOU MORE THAN ANY PERSON EVER COULD, HE CREATED YOU! Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."-John 14:6 "But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven."-Matthew 10:33 “For the wages of sin is death (hell), but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”-Romans 6:23
I remember watching it on our black and white TV. People went running out of their homes and businesses yelling "we've landed on the moon...we've landed on the moon". In 1973 we got the World Book Encyclopedia and I loved looking at all the colored images under the space section.
The variety of kerosene used in US rockets is called RP-1 (the russiana have something called T-1 that is similar) It's far more refined than regular kerosene with lower sulphur, less alkenes and a tighter distillation range to give a higher quality fuel with more predictable behaviour.
Many people are either blissfully ignorant, stupid, or maliciously against the advancements of space, and the research of it. These people fail to realize that most of our Earthly problems center around issues that space has the resources, and logistical problem solving skills that would greatly benefit Earth in the likes of which are revolutionary, and change how life is dramatically. The hardest of problems, when solved, have always given the best fruits in solutions. This being either in ingenuity, resourcefulness, teamwork, and research. Especially when taking into account mining on foreign celestial objects, such as asteroids and planets.
good video sir, really interesting. just one clarification from a pedant chemist: at 9:04 you say that 4 moles of hydrogen are used, but if you look closely you can see that that hydrogen has no "2" at his pedice, hence I suggest you to correct it because if you leave it like this it seem like you're using radical hydrogen. also I don't understand why you didn't add the plus sign (+) in between oxygen and hydrogen generated trough electrolysis in the same set of equations; finally the CO2 at the bottom equation should have the 2 at pedice since it indicates the fact that the carbon is linked to two oxygens. as a general rule for chemistry equations: numbers in front of formulas are normal and those indicates the number of molecules obtained, and numbers in the formulas of in front of formulas indicate how many atoms are included in that molecule hence are write smaller ( pedice). if you need a clarification contact me freely. have a goo day.
Please look into the reaction equations again. 9:00, 11:00 Between 4H2 and 2O2 belongs a plus and the plus sign in front of line two is not necessary (same for 11:45). The 2 in CO2 in the third line needs to be subscript. There are missing many subscript 2’s as well. 12:30 It’s supposed to be 3CO2. I studied chemistry so im automatic in such things. :D Besides that i liked the video quite a lot.
I dont get what you wanted to say with the reaction equation under “Hydrogen Transport” at 11:45… its the same like on the left side only with less electrolysis. Im confused
@@huwzebediahthomas9193 I wasn’t thinking of one in particular, sorry. Just the general shape of it; steel elastic region, long, upwards strain-hardening region.
@@mitchstilborn Yes I know. Great research is being done to make new elements - amazing what can be made with extreme low and high temperatures, and they are very stable at those temperatures. But fall to electrons and protons at room temperature though. 🙂
one advantage of methane that you missed is that for every other fuel combination you need to insulate between the lox and the fuel or one will freeze the other. Methane doesn't need this. It's also worth noting that SpaceX isn't the only company working on methane rockets, there are several others doing so.
The thing about methane is even compared to other paraffins like Propane, Butane and higher up, methane has to be just below LOX’s boiling point but just above the fuel’s melting point. Whereas with Ethane and Propane they boil much higher than methane but freeze at lower temperatures. Butane freezes at considerably warmer temperatures as you’d expect but Propane, being denser than methane yet more common than Ethane while being immensely more storable, would make a practical Rocket fuel.
So in short: Methane, hands down is the best performing fuel when large scale multiplanetary missions are the goal, with hydrogen being the best performing overall for more distant missions requiring more efficiency. Propane, however is a close third, being highly practical for getting vehicles to orbit from planetary bodies of gravity higher than the moon due to better density than hydrogen or methane, but with in-between specific impulse to kerosene and methane and considerably more difficult to manufacture sustainably.
@@topsecret1837 Is propane more energy dense for it's mass? I know I've seen videos about one company (IIRC in the UK) working to build a propane powered rocket, but I thought the video talked about propane having less energy than methane
@@topsecret1837 actually, hydrogen isn't the best for deep space missions, for those you want an ion drive. Once you get to orbit you no longer need the high thrust that chemical propellants give you, and what matters more is specific impulse (modified to take into account the tank mass, not just the reaction mass) Hydrolox is pretty good, but still only about half of what an ion drive can produce (not accounting for power supply and tank mass) and nuclear thermal engines can be even higher (same caviot applying)
@@davidelang In a sense, the video does mention how little insulation is needed at the shared LOX/methane bulkhead. For Hydrogen they didn't share the bulkhead.
Wait... So Highfleet’s worldbuilding actually makes sense using liquid compressed methane to power massive airships? And the fact that the Co2 that is expelled by thrusters into the atmosphere can be recondensed and refined back into liquid methane? HOLY CRAP THATS NEAT
CO2 can always be brought back to methane, but thermodynamics say that you need to put at least the same amount of energy back into the reaction. engineering says you need more energy. This process is only viable if the energy is from renewable (non CO2 emitting) sources and the original process must emit CO2, such as cement production.
@@abelknecht4943 seeing as how Highfleets world features a nuclear reactor the size of a city and hundreds of thousand+ ton airships outputting enough rocket thrust to instantly insulate a small planetoid with greenhouse emissions I still think it’s pretty neat on the worldbuilding how this all fits together
I encourage everyone to think through the "climate change consensus" that has attributed the "problem" to CO2. Several counterpoints to consider: 1. Vostock ice cores show unquestionably that past atmospheric CO2 concentrations were more than an order of magnitude greater than today (long before SUVs). 2. The atomic weight of CO2 is 44 yet the average atomic weight of the atmosphere is a smidge below 29, therefore, CO2 only exists in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere (put there primarily by volcanism). CO2 is mainly confined to the lowermost strata of the atmosphere which doesn't create any kind of "feedback loop" or what could in any way be characterized as a "greenhouse effect" (admittedly, CO2 does indeed absorb infra-red radiation which is a good thing... We'd likely freeze, otherwise). 3. The optimum atmospheric CO2 concentration to support photosynthesis is more than 4x what it is currently - if anything we should be ADDING MORE CO2 to the atmosphere instead of stupidly doing everything possible to remove it. Current atmospheric CO2 concentration is much closer to the starvation level for plants than it is to the past maximum (not even close). 4. Professor Ian Clark, et. al., have conclusively proven that atmospheric CO2 levels actually follow Earth temperature instead of the other way around - as suggested by the "consensus". In other words, that big glowy thing in the sky is primarily what determines the temperature on Earth just like it always has. The fact is that atmospheric CO2 levels adapt to temperature (with an approximate 800 year delay). It can be argued that the only things "driven" by CO2 are bubbly beverages and plant growth. It can also be argued that the "demonization" of CO2 is more about power and control than it is about solving any kind of real problem. We desperately need to re-open the debate across all venues - only this time with all points of view given a seat at the table instead of the agenda driven echo- chamber we've had since the beginning of this so-called debate (from all sides).
Amazing! Nice to see a science channel show WHY we should spend money on science. People complained about the Apollo program, not realizing how many scientific and engineering advancements we use every day today were the direct result of that expenditure of money. You almost always get more back from the spending on science, than from any other thing.
Successful carbon capture technology doesn't only hinge on reduced cost but more importantly on the high energy requirements. CCS is very power intensive and using fossil fuel power would naturally ruin CCS efficiency, whereas building out renewable power to meet our energy needs would quickly make CCS redundant. In both cases CCS as a bridge technology is only useful to the industries that promote it but not for actual climate change mitigation.
One thing to point out about the various fuels is how temperature compatible are the propellent and LOX. Liquid hydrogen is so cold that it will freeze LOX to a slush if there's a common wall. So even the "common dome" needs to be insulated. That decreases the Isp of hydrolox. For Falcon9, the kerosene is chilled to close to LOX temperature. And liquid methane has a similar temperature to LOX, for simple, light fuel tanks.
Brilliant is not for engineers. It's for upcoming engineers. I tried it with your recommendations. I could easily solve many courses without any issue.
"Brilliant" cannot educate. They can make you feel like you've gone crazy. You can get you answers right, but they will tell you they're not, only for them to come back WEEKS later, only to offer a measly corporate apology for all the possible damage they could've done. And all thet happened in the demo before you even pay them. I doubt they're doing it any better on their paid program.
Very nice presentation. Could you make a follow-up video with ways to process Mars rock into H2, O2 and metals? Excuse my lack of chemistry - but is there a way to do something with CO?
"Working on difficult problems to make Mars habitable will directly lead to helping solve the greatest problem facing earth today". This is not a valid argument. How about we just, y'know, directly put the effort into solving earth's problems instead of inefficiently in a roundabout way mess around with Mars which is a complete waste of effort.
Once you get the methane, you can continue to reuse the water made from the methane making process. A one time shipment of water or hydrogen may be viable as it cancels the need to build mining infrastructure on Mars when resources are scarce.
A multitude of tanker Starship, perhaps purpose built just for this specific preparation mission, could bring not only the equipment necessary, but mainly a literal ship load of water, or if very courageous or stupid, HTP, our good old friend Hydrogen Peroxide H2O2.
@@rolfbjorn9937 peroxide tends to be extremely heavy for the amount of hydrogen it brings. Water is already extremely overweight. Problem with transporting pure hydrogen is leaks. It takes months for hydrogen to ship, and it's not guaranteed a respectable amount of hydrogen is delivered. But if you plan to also bring oxygen to mars, by all means, go ahead, but oxygen is way easier to extract on mars, and doesn't require too much infrastructure.
"Thermodynamic equilibrium is a war of attrition that the universe will always win." - @5:49 Not just an engineering mind, Brian - quite a poet, too! Love it.
Great video, but i wouldn't say CO2 have potential. Energy is release when you oxyde something (carbon for CO2, iron for rust), like iron in a nuclear reaction, it's an high entropy byproduct. You had to heat and pressure the CO2 and hydrogen ,aka dump a crazy amount of energy, to reverse the reaction. It's like saying an empty battery having potential, quite the contrary in fact. CO2 is interesting as an energy storage if it's what you mean by potential.
Interestingly the reduction of CO2 to methane with Hydrogen is exothermic. So it releases energy, but this is because the splitting of hydrogen releases a lot of energy, more than needed to convert CO2 to methane.
The video is pretty clear. Potencial as a feasable fuel (as methane) for reusable spaceships going to Mars. It's very specific to what is said in the video, use Mars atmosphere, rich in CO2 to make the Methane for the return trip. The reaction, as explained in the video, can be done in 2 ways and does need catalysts and power. Power can be a problem and they'll likely say solar power maybe enough. Funny considering how much power can actually be produced per square meter, on Mars surface, if you can keep them clean from dust. Wind power? I wonder if it'll survive the dust and storms. So a lot of "ifs".
@@strix5779 Yes the reduction is exothermic, so yeah you can maybe retrieve some of the energy spend to cool down the CO2, then pre-heat and pressurize it. You can also put a streling engine next to a rocket exaust. Whatever you do, nothing is free with thermodynamic. You have to spend more energy to create the fuel than you get by burning it. You can heat and pessure almost any organic matter (mostly water and carbon) to turn them to hydrocarbon
@@chaoswarriorbr Agreed, power is what's matter. But if you need CO2 and Sunlight, why not do it on a balloon floating in the venusian atmosphere ? Going back to Mars, the best option is a small fission nuclear reactor. Whatever the energy source, efficient cooling without a dense atmosphere will be an issue.
Why would you capture CO2 from a power plant and turn it back into fuel? It would take a lot of energy to "un-burn" that CO2. If that energy is coming from the power plant, you'd have to input about 4x as much energy into the un-burning than the power plant produced in the first place. Where does that energy come from? Nuclear power? If so, why not just put that energy on the grid in the first place?
@@VariantAEC But the point I'm making is if you're burning the fossil fuel for energy, it'll take much MORE energy to turn that CO2 back into fuel. Where does that come from? If it's from a nuclear reactor or renewables, why bother with the fossil fuels in the first place?
@@blurglide My point is that it doesn't matter where it comes from. If the greens suddenly adopt nuclear as the least CO2 intensive way to get electricity they will use it in a vein attempt to sequester CO2.
@@VariantAEC But if you had sufficient nuclear energy to sequester CO2 as it leaves a smokestack, then you have more than enough to just shut down the plant emitting the CO2
@@blurglide The energy from the nuclear plant would be used to sequester CO2 in lieu of providing energy for other needs, like running a hospital or data center or whatever else normal people would be using electricity for. This is the greens plan. So long as they see CO2 as a boogeyman they will not stop to reduce it even though it is a requirement for plant life to exist. Rather counterproductively greens would rather destroy the environment by eliminating CO2 than prevent other gaseous, liquid and solid wastes from destroying plant life. Also remember they would stare plants all over the world to save the ecosystem which to them relies on plants being alive. I never said the greens nake any sense.
Another reason they went with Methane is that is allows the full flow staged combustion cycle of the Raptor to work. The Merlin uses uses Kerosene and has minimal to no refurbishment required.
Indeed. It would be extremely difficult to implement in an engine that burns hydrogen, due to the enormous difference in density (and therefore frow rate) of hydrogen and oxygen.
The only other full-flow engine to reach a late stage of development was the USSR's RD-270, which burned the similarly dense (but extremely toxic) hypergolics UDMH and N2O4.
It's the other way around actually. Since they're going with methane they chose to develop a full-flow stage combustion engine. The choice of the propellants is a level above the choice of the thermal cycle because it influences your architecture a lot more.
@@spacelapsus8835 I see it as sort of a package deal. Along with the other reusability benefits of methane, you also get the relatively benign turbopump environments.
@@pseudotasuki yeah that is for sure true. However, what I meant was that you first have to settle on a propellant to then start considering the architecture of the propulsion subsystem. The choice of the propellant is governed by the type of mission you're dealing with. For example, long term missions generally (it's not always the case but it is often true) won't opt for cryogenic propellants for the final stages because of the complexity of storing at such low temperatures for extended periods of time. In this case, the choice of methane came from the possibility of in-situ extraction and the better performaces compared to RP1.
I really like it when you don't have "Insane" in your titles, better to use incredible, mind-bend or amazing, since engineering is most of the time far from insane. I know you gotta get them clicks, but the right flavour of superlative is important 😅
@Ransford Flentjar if you go thru Real Engineerings videos you will notice that most videos about the engineering of things have Insane in their title. Like: The INSANE engineering of the A10 Warthog Or The INSANE engineering of the SR71 Blackbird It's just getting a little old.
Having slept on the space news for the last 3 years, I have no idea how exactly does having larger fuel tank volume negate thrust efficiency and why do we care about it negating whatever it negates
Larger tanks are heavier because they're made of more material. Pushing more weight means the engines have to work harder, which negates the higher efficiency of the fuel.
Great video! Your reason for the importance of NASA and other space research science etc is spot on and a constant justifiable positive argument I have had for decades with those that ask those questions and don’t understand. Most people don’t know all the benefits that have come from those decades of science in their everyday lives, medical science one of the biggest, too many to name. Go space X! And other commercial ventures!!
Good stuff as always! In an attempt to broaden people's knowledge base and critical thinking open mindedness, I recommend; Dr. Will Happen, Dr. Willy Soon, Dr. Freeman Dyson, and Dr. Nils Axel Morner.
Thanks for the well done video. What I liked most about this video is that it wasn't degraded by having to look at someone's face presenting this video.
1:10 this is a gross oversimplification. A liquid hydrogen first stage was considered, and would have been feasible to build - and would have resulted in the Saturn V weighing only 2/3 what it did. The reason they didn't go with it wasn't tank size, it was that liquid hydrogen produces much lower *thrust* than kerosene, so building a powerful enough first stage engines would have been more challenging.
can use booster like they did with the Space Shuttle. Solid fuel has the highest thrust ever so they are often used as a strapped-on boosters for lots of rockets.
@@xponen I don't think that solid fuel rockets were where they needed to be at the time, plus the US had little experience with the concept at the time the Saturn V was designed(though it's noteworthy that the Soviet N-1 also lacked boosters, despite their experience with them).
@@angrymokyuu9475 The largest ever solid rocket motor was actually fired in 1965 and 1966 (weighing about 850T, compared to the 600T for the shuttle). These were meant to be alternative first stages for the Saturn 1B, but were never flown... or even removed from the test stand after firing, they're still there.
At 14:14 it speaks of using the Sabatier process in creating storable energy. I don't get this. If you're starting point is hydrogen (presumably via electrolysis) you lose more energy creating liquid methane than creating liquid hydrogen. Liquid methane might find a use in things like ships (due to easier storage), but for grid scale energy storage, where you've got room for the insulation, liquid hydrogen probably wins.
Insulation is not the way. For every liquid, its boiling point increases with external pressure. If stored in a strong enough vessel, a liquified gas can keep itself liquid through its own vapor pressure. For example, lighter fluid is actually a gas under normal conditions, but the body of a lighter is strong enough to contain the vapor pressure and keep the fuel liquid. The lower the boiling point, the more pressure is needed to keep the liquid from boiling at room temperature. Liquid methane has a much higher boiling point than hydrogen, so it's not unfeasible to store it in high pressure tanks with minimal insulation. Besides, its molecules are a lot larger than hydrogen, so methane-tight storage tanks are much easier to make than hydrogen-tight ones; as was mentioned in the video, methane has a lot more energy per volume as a liquid, so it's more space efficient as well. You're right that it is theoretically more energy efficient to store hydrogen directly instead of methane, but practically storing (and let alone transporting) one is way easier than the other.
@@pocarski Yeah, but to keep liquid hydrogen a liquid, even at liquid nitrogen temperature, requires extreme pressure (not going to look it up right now, but its huge). The point about hydrogen is not transporting it. Rather you liquefy it on site and convert it back to electricity on site. Likewise if you need hydrogen for steel making, you make it on site and use it on site. Methane could have its uses, but ammonia is denser, easier to store and is being promoted as a fuel for things like ships.
Is energy efficiency the correct metric though? If you have wind turbines turning and not enough demand to soak that up, the rest would be going to waste. From that pov an inefficient process that results in an easier to store fuel isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you're storing fuel over multi year periods cheapness and ease of storage likely wins over efficiency of something that was going to waste anyway.
@@saumyacow4435 I've looked it up, both of us forgot about supercritical fluids. If you get a hot enough gas under high enough pressure, it becomes a fluid that blends together properties of liquid and gas. Both methane and hydrogen are supercritical at room temperature, so this entire argument is moot because both of them get properties so cursed that I couldn't find a single formula that describes them. Hydrogen's critical pressure is 13 atmospheres, while methane's is around 45. I'm not entirely sure what that means for storing them, because I have zero idea about what happens to pressure vs density when a gas is hotter than its critical temperature.
@@pocarski Yeah, I looked it up and came to that conclusion. I think hydrogen would be supercritical even at liquid nitrogen temperature and worse, it would be fairly low density. Even so, liquid hydrogen at atmospheric pressure has its uses and I suspect there are ways to recover some of the energy used in liquefying it.
Mars actually has ice everywhere, not just at the poles. Almost everywhere has a sub-surface permafrost layer. Down to mid latitudes this is pretty shallow, just a meter under the surface, at lower latitudes it's probably deeper and somewhat more sparse. Some regions include sub-surface glaciers of high water ice concentration, as shallow as a meter below ground, and these exist even at mid latitudes in many locations. Seeking a location to site a Martian colony one would want to look for easy access to sub-surface glaciers.
"Space, the final frontier.." It's not just about conquering the great expanse. It's about solving difficult puzzles. And unlocking new ways to use existing resources. Because, by the time we unlock faster light travel. The problem with pollution and climate change would have been solved.
If we had some kind of pre-launch slingshot like a railgun of sorts we could minimize the fuel load considerably as a massive amount of fuel is spent in the first few seconds just to get it moving. Getting it moving faster sooner means they can also make the bell more efficient by gearing it towards higher altitudes further reducing fuel load. Not to mention the additional fuel dedicated to lift that startup fuel.
Good point, it would be interesting to see a plot of change in mass or weight vs velocity, or vs thrust, or even time. I bet the weight of that startup fuel you mentioned would be staggering.
Hydrogen is also REALLY hard to store. Like with the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the fuel both has to be ultra high purity and wants to leak out of even sealed gas cylinders
@@greensheen8759 then how did Hindenburg keep its Hydrogen in its balloon despite being in the year 1936 for days of flight across the Atlantic ocean?
yes but thats only true for PURE hydrogen. Mix 70% hydrogen with 30% methane and things will SENSIBLY improuve at all chapters . You can still do your much needed reactions even in a mixture of gases because methane doesnt intervene at all in them
I think the chemical equations at 9:00 (& repeated elsewhere in the video) should be 4(H2O) --> 4(H2) + 2(O2) 4(H2) + (CO2) --> 2(H2O) + (CH4) (Using parentheses because I can't do subscripts here, so treat all numbers inside parentheses as subscripts.) Note 2nd equation is shown correctly at 8:55.
@12:17 did you find an error in the final eqn for the 'Hydrogen Transport' final eqn too? Requiring 2 moles O2 for every 1 of CH4), I get: 5CO2 + 4H2 -> 4CO + 2H2O +CH4 + 2O2 compared to video: 3CO2 + 6H2 -> CH4 + 2CO + 4H2O . Both eqns are balanced...but since the product oxygen (needed for subsequent combustion) is omitted in the products I think the molar coefficients in the video are in error. Is this correct?
@@2hedz77 all equations @12:17(RWGSR + SR) are balanced. But the formulas at bottom keep changing until 12:31, & I do see a problem there. 2 C atoms on left, but 3 C on right 4 oxygen atoms on left, but 6 oxygen on right 12 H atoms on left, 12 H on right, but that will have probably to change when the others are fixed. . Is that what you mean by final equation?
You are right! Yes @12:31 ... total mess. But what I am saying is that @12:17 he did not include oxygen in the products. Therefore even though the equation is balanced it is wrong because one of the products is totally missed! Anyway...what a mess of a video. Not sure what happened.
Yes, I found "ignition" to be a book that allowed my fictional mind to gravitate towards profound possibilities. Whereas, it not only gave me a clear process of the science of Rocket Fuels, but it also enlightened my creativity level to design rockets and propellents for future use. Awesome vid thx! 💖👍
Great video, as always! I would definitely mention synthesising fuel on Mars in the title. If I had seen that, I would have immediately clicked (instead of having to convince myself to click because I know your videos are good stuff).
Awesome video. You really inspired me. I am concerned with how we will get hydrogen to mars to make methane. You can't just ship it to mars because it's not dense enough to be shipped without creating complex problems. What we need is metallic hydrogen. Sadly that's about as trusted to be coming soon as fusion. It is the ultimate dream fuel.
While relatively trivial in the overall scheme of the video the reasoning for using RP-1 (kerosene) for the Saturn V is not really correct. Density is a factor but much more important is delta-v. Delta-v is the fancy term for how far a rocket can go. When you look at the equation for delta-v the efficiency of the engine is not very important in the first stage of a rocket. However the first stage is the heaviest. It so happens the thrust is inversely proportional to rocket efficiency so almost all rockets use less efficient but higher thrust engines on the first stage. I should note that it doesn't matter how efficient your first stage engines are if they don't have higher thrust than gravity you will sit on the launch pad uselessly burning fuel.
Yes, one of the reasons why methane was chosen for the raptor engine is that the full flow cycle is impossible with kerosene (too dirty) so raptor actually has more thrust than a kerosene engine.
That is what he's saying, I think. You can always add more thrust, that is never the issue. The issue is the tradeoff you're making if you add more thrust. The weight you gain depends on the specific impulse, while for volume it's density if propellant. So for the first stage, you could say h2 was not dense enough to prove enough thrust, in that: providing enough thrust would've cause the tanks to become too large. Hence they went with kerosene.
@@Merthalophor SpaceX is increasing thrust by increasing chamber pressure and not the chamber size so they are not trading anything. That's the whole point of the full flow cycle. Denser propellants are easier to pump because the volume of fuel to pump is lower, but you can also increase the power of the pump and that's what they are doing with raptor, the turbopumps combined power is so great that chamber pressure is higher despite methane being less dense.
@@Merthalophor That's not exactly how it works. Firstly we need to think about a multi stage rocket as a series of rockets carrying increasingly smaller ones. So the equation for delta-v looks like this Δv=Ve*ln((Mi+P)/(Mf+P)) where P is the mass of the payload the stage is caring, noting that Ve=Isp*9.81. From this we make two observations: one, the performance of a stage is proportional to the fraction of mass expelled, two, using cursory limits if P is big the Δv->Ve*0, if P is small Δv->Ve*c where c is some constant. Real Engineering's explanation for kerosene in the first stage is that the tank size for hydrogen would be too heavy. While this isn't wrong it wasn't the main reason. Now the Saturn V is almost a two stage rocket, technically it burned a small amount of fuel in the third stage for orbital insertion but that is trivial in the grand scheme of things. The second stage only had to carry the rest of the rocket into orbit where as the first stage had to carry the rest of the rocket and the entire second stage. As a result the payload of the first stage is vastly greater than the second stage. Thinking back to our limits the delta-v of the first stage is Ve*c where c is a small constant and the delta-v of the second stage is Ve*C where C is a big constant. As a result putting efficient engines on the bottom stage makes less of a difference than putting them on the stop stage. Now the F-1 engine (Saturn V first stage) produces 6.8MW of sea level thrust. The J-2 engine (Saturn V second stage) produced 0.5MW of sea level thrust. If the J-2 has a sea level optimised nozzle you could expect about 0.8MW of sea level thrust. So to have the Saturn V lift-off you would need 43 J-2 engines. The cost savings of less fuel would be inconsequential compared to that many engines and plumbing complexity. But it gets worse, every engine has a chance of failure and engines of the time weren't vary reliable. Using our favourite binomial distribution the chance of at least one failing would be near certain. So the biggest reason we put low efficiency high thrust engines on the first stage is because of cost savings and reliability. Mass (and density) overall is a minor consideration. Hope that helps
@@johntheux9238 Not really. Because of boil off issues transiting to mars space X can't use hydrogen. As a result they need the absolute highest efficiency to compensate because trying to get into orbit with only 300s of Isp (highest efficiency of non full-flow) is a fools errand. Furthermore full-flow is the only way to achieve high thrust and have both oxidiser and propellant enter the combustion chamber as a gas making them very reliable which is critical when you're an entire planet away. The RnD costs of developing full-flow is stupendous. No private company would willingly take it on if there is an alternative which for space X there isn't.
But using carbon in the atmosphere to make fuel uses more energy than it creates... It would aid climate change, but it wouldn't make sense as a power source
My brother worked with the team who synthesized SpaceX’s new fuel, it’s the exact same formula, just with your 1 small classified change, they know as long as 1 part per 1,000 Gallon’s is different, they are allowed to market it as new fuel, & I have no idea what I’m talking about:
CO2 can always be brought back to methane, but thermodynamics say that you need to put at least the same amount of energy back into the reaction. engineering says you need more energy. This process is only viable if the energy is from renewable (non CO2 emitting) sources and the original process must emit CO2, such as cement production. Otherwise just avoiding the combustion is way better.
As far as Earth is concerned, carbon-to-fuel processes are intended to be a temporary step. Obviously the idea of capturing carbon into fuel only to burn it again seems silly, but the ability to sell the produced fuel provides a potential economic basis to cement and improve the technology. The capture itself at this point is carbon neutral so long as its power source is as well. Once further progress has been made on upscaling renewables, the cost of carbon capture can be shifted off of manufactured fuel and onto tax-funded subsidies/direct use of revenue from renewable power. Now that selling and burning the captured carbon is no longer required, all those well-established carbon capture plants can just switch to permanent storage and sequestration of carbon.
@@keco185 i was using nuclear as an example of high energy density. Like a rocket with liquid fuel thats a tenth of what it weighs now. But speaking of nuclear its just so awesome to hear how in nuclear submarines the fuel can last longer than the submarine itself. Thats the power of energy density.
@@Hydrargyrum8 matter-antimatter reactions release insane amounts of energy(literally the highest density fuel possible with our current understanding of physics), the problem is, storing anti-matter is insanely difficult and so is making it
@@mastershooter64 yeah. But thats a bit too far in the future though if we are talking about simply exploring our solar system. Definitely not within our lifetime.
We do use Radio isotope Thermal Generators (RTGs) for Mars rovers and some space crafts very far away where solar power is unfeasible. Nuclear doesn't provide good enough power to weight in its current form to propel a rocket into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but could provide a means of a super efficient second stage if made light enough and able to be cooled properly.
At last the scientists came to this very obvious conclusion: "Todays' pollution is the raw materials of tomorrow, and the only two differences between a landfill and a gold mine is level of technology and business incentive".
Carbon was always a raw material and despite what he and maybe even you believe you're made of this element. I guess you are a pollutant... and so are literally all the other plants and animals on Earth. So what would we be saving? The climate indoctrination is complete for many people. Humans bad because CO2 and widely Carbon itself is considered bad. Everything that holds your body together is primarily made from Carbon. I guess humans forget that?
In the beginning is that the voice of Wernur Van Beebles . . . a former NAH - ZEE ????? Yeah - us. But his ability to use paper clips saved him from doom.
Having tried to read Ignition, I can ask why it's so popular as it's poorly written and the author says he didn't any drafting. Since it's organized by chemical types, it jumps around between countries and eras constantly often with no explanation why said chemical was or wasn't preffered. Also he's suppose to be funny but for every one joke there's another gratitous jab against all sorts of people.
I always find it surprising to see an inspiring quote delivered by an ex-nazi. I wonder how von Braun would be considered if he gave up this ideology *today* and wanted to come help build rockets.
Von Braun never really had an ideology beyond his dream of building rockets. He skillfully and *without any scruple* used the political environment he found himself in to fulfill his dream. In the days of the Sputnik shock he sold his idea for the SaturnV to Kennedy just as he had sold his idea for the first big liquid fuel artillery rocket to the Military of the Weimarer Republik and later to the Wehrmacht and subsequently to the Nazis. People often forget that von Braun started his development program for long range Missiles in 1932 under the supervision of the Reichswehr.
![Twenty One Pilots - The Line (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XCz7WUotXs8/mqdefault.jpg)
![Lethal Company Music Video 🎵 "Follow The Orders" [VERSION A]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QeooZB4Z7RA/mqdefault.jpg)
"Where I can inspire, brilliant can educate"
Don't sell yourself short man, you've taught me a hell of a lot
@John Thomas no idea who you're talking about
@@hughjass1976 You're _definitely_ a big fan of Big Clive! Don't deny it!
Must be a loot of moneyy
@@General12th who is that
rocketship man bad.
The reason it burned with so much soot was it was a deliberately fuel rich mixture. If they ran the engines at perfect stoichiometric ratios, they would have melted. And some of the soot is from the turbopump. And the ratio could be changed to "throttle" the engine via the engines' "Propellant Utilization" valves. (It's not actually throttling, but had a similar thrust modulating effect . )
Came here to make this same comment. Black exhaust you see at ignition is turbopump spinning up. Then in the main exhaust plume you can see the color change between the turbopump exhaust and combustion chamber exhaust.
my understanding was that most of the black soot you see is actually the exhaust of the fuel-rich gas generator being used as film cooling inside the nozzle of the main engine, not the main engine running below stoichiometric balance. Like the main combustion chamber they run hot but then to stop the throat of the nozzle from melting they flow the relatively cool exhaust from the gas generator powering the propellent pumps between the walls of the nozzle and the hot gas from the main combustion chamber
@BELIEVE in JESUS no thanks.
@BELIEVE in JESUS Judges 21: doing mass murder and kidnapping little girls is all part of god's plan.
@@garethbaus5471 just report it as spam.
Love the 3d models😃
18 likes no comments?
Hellow Jared owen
Great fan of you!
'Course you do.
Omg hello im a fan of you, nice meeting you jared!
A note about sooty rocket exhaust - a few times you talk about how sooty rp1 is and at the same time show a bunch of relatively dark black flecked exhaust from a Saturn five launch. Yes the combustion is relatively incomplete which is why we can see the yellow flame but it isn’t like what you show in these clips. That part of the exhaust comes from film cooling, where they purposely ran fuel rich mixture around the outside of the nozzle to keep it from overheating.
Thank you, a very important detail there. Although he isn't wrong about the soot, the example (at least for someone who knows more deeply what's going on) was poorly chosen. It does also still get a point across.
A video for those more interested in film cooling, and many other cooling options that have been developed for rocket engine nozzles: ruclips.net/video/he_BL6Q5u1Y/видео.html
And it only appears dark because the cameras are set to film the extremely bright flames.
@@pseudotasuki Even though the camera setting may make it look darker, it really is a almost black smoke, you can see this nicely with the merlin enigine testfires, its a different engine, but the same cycle type
@@MihkelKukk Great info in this one, thanks!
Albert Einstein said something like "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it yourself". I think Albert would approve of this video.
Except the critical equation isn't balanced and the hydrogen isn't represented correctly. It makes it very difficult to even understand his point about producing enough oxygen.
My teacher in airframe electrical, Jerry Adams said "I will teach at the level of the best student in the class.It wasn't my best subject but I wonder if he was mostly assigning things and not knowing.I was curious about his use of "device when describing anything electrical.I looked the definition up and told him his usage was incorrect.He acted insulted but I passed.
@@amosbackstrom5366or maybe your just not fast enough to understand it
I would like to hear Albert Einstein's simple explanation of gravity.
@@treborobotacon space blanket with bowling ball rolling around on top
Methane LOX is very clean. It also allows for the use of co-axial fuel tanks where the LOX tank is surrounded by the Methane tank. This creates a very strong and efficient structure while decreasing the weight of the LOX tank.
But I think its also very dangerous. If the tank somehow leaked just a few of those gases together, Elon Musk will have to face Colombia disaster happened somewhere between Mars and Earth
Plus Methane can be obtained with... poop
🤗🚀
It is very easy (some farms and rural facilities do that) and it's named Biogaz
I can thoroughly recommend reading “ignition!”, it is absolutely packed with information and they should make a film of his career as a rocket propellant expert. They even used liquid mercury once as a propellant. He also talks about using chlorine triflouride (which actually burns concrete on contact!) as a propellant too, among myriads of other types.
Chlorine Trifluoride? Bafwa! That is the most potent oxidizer ever. I hear a Chlorine Trifluoride tank ruptured and caused a meter of cement pavement and dirt to burn for six hours.... It's remarkably hard to contain it, I think it requires stainless steel tank... But one minor defect in the tank and it burns right through!!!
@@kayakMike1000 As a virologist we'd need to store our cell lines in liquid nitrogen, so as you decant LN2 from one flask to another, liquid oxygen drips off the metal transfer tube. One of the engineer's tricks was to collect the LO2, take a mouthful and blow it through a lit cigarette. Instant flamethrower! We're a bit more safety conscious nowadays!
The FOOF and ozone chapters were interesting too, actually the whole book was very enjoyable. I should really take the time to read through it again sometime soon. Many substances that were tried seem a bit insane to even want to work with. Dimethyl mercury also vaguely stands out as one of the mad things they experimented with at one point.
The mystery of disappearing ethanol fuel and happy researchers + sailors was funny too. Even after adding things to make it not fit for consumption, I was kinda curious how often that went wrong and if saving it from combustion ever went beyond just distilling it again.
@@davidlloyd3116 Totally off-topic but we're here now - I used to have fun working in the lab as well, also a virologist. LN2 was fun as was dry ice. We'd get reagents shipped on dry ice, I used to put it into one of the big sinks and blast the high pressure hot tap on it and fill the room with billowing clouds of water vapour and co2. probably quite dangerous but it's denser than air and sinks. Also using LN2 to clean the lab floor. when you pour it out of a dewar onto the floor it scoots along and picks up any dust as it bobbles about in the Leidenfrost effect. One weekend I was working and took a bottle of fresh lemonade with me, I put it in a bowl with some dry ice to make a sorbet, but it ended up fizzy, I should really have used liquid nitrogen.
One of my biggest regrets is when I got my mate a job there and was showing him the prep room. there was a bottle of concentrated HCl 37% I told him it smelt vinegary expecting him to do the proper scientist sniff and waft some towards your nose with your hand, but he just put his nose over the bottle and huffed. It stung his nose and he coughed out a cloud of hydrogen chloride gas. not particularly pleasant, but he was not permanently harmed.
@@satyris410 lmao like a true chemist: "not permanently harmed"
Another benefit of methane is that since it has a similar boiling temperature as oxygen, not only can they use similar infrastructure, they can also be stored right next to each other in the rocket with minimal insulation which is not possible with hydrogen and oxygen or kerosene and oxygen, since the differences in the boiling point for those liquids is too much. This save space, simplifies components, and saves on the mass of systems within the ship to cool the propellants since you can use one system instead of two separate ones. All of that really helps when you want to mass produce those systems and tanks for as cheaply as possible.
very cool
Isn't one of the advantages of an LH2/LOX with a common bulkhead that the temperature difference creates a vacuum within the bulkhead and thus insulates even further?
Methane is highly damaging to ozone, though
@@edbunkers4516 it is not damaging to the ozone, it is just a potent greenhouse gas
@@mcrvids6860
No.
This is the 1st I've heard of this technology. It is KISS simple and one of those things that was right in front of us all this time.
Brilliant!
By the way that 400C reaction temperature for the Sabatier process is about 200C below the operating temperature of the MSR built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Most Solar Thermal systems using molten salts operate around 600C as well, so there are several options for cheap thermal energy to run the reaction.
But it is Nuclear, and people don't want to acknowledge there are distinctions and places it can work meaning Politicians will fan the flames on why we should not bother.
Your consistency and quality of content never disappoints! ❤
Eww bot 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 200 views on videos🤮🤮🤮
@Alysra [Toxic Squad] go away
@BELIEVE in JESUS why casting spell here
😄
What was not said was the the water at the pole can not be transported. Mars is big. You can nit drive that far.
3:25 THAT SHOT
That just has to be the most breathtaking shot of the Saturn V ever
The darker exhaust on the Saturn launch is because there is fuel sprayed down the sided of the nozzle to provide cooling. Not all kerosene rocket exhausts look as dark as that.
I'm pretty sure it's actually fuel-rich exhaust from the preburner that is funneled there to cool it
It was sprayed on the side of the Motor Nozzle. It was pumped through pipes around the nozzle.
@@PBMS123 This is correct
He's a muskrat and they're not known for their intelligence
NOPE. fuel is used to cool the engine - but it is then cycled back into the combustion chamber.
"We have been given the scientific knowledge, the technical ability and the materials to pursue the exploration of the universe. To ignore these great resources, will be a corruption of a God-given ability"
I just love this opening address ❤️
It's not true. Not everything that man has the ability to do, should be done. Jesus had the ability to make stones into loaves of bread, in the wilderness of temptation. He wouldn't do it, because that is not what God put Him on earth for. As a race, we face destruction from many sources: war, environment, economic. Every time a new invention comes out, we manage to turn it into something that hurtles our race towards extinction. We are not fit to colonize other worlds until we solve our own problems at home.
Same isn't this the German American in the opening Wernher Vonn Baun one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration
@@kevinmaher7687 And yes, that's Wernher Von Braun, one of the Nazis that the USA just happen to forgive and forget that he was a war criminal and instrumental in the V1 and V2 bombing of the UK.
But hey... so what eh, as long as he mentions god and lays the foundation of the USA's rocket program.
@@kevinmaher7687 Von Braun, disciple of Oberth (Germany). Count also Tsiolkovsky and Korolev in the east, Esnault-Pelterie in France and Goddard in the west.
💫🚀
Ad Astra !!
Soviets had already developed mathalox rocket engines : RD-0162, RD-0141 & RD-0143, RD-183 & RD-185. Unfortunately, they never flew on a real rocket, only static fires had been conducted.
Don't compare r tech to Russia there stuff works unrest like there tanks
@@benjaminreinersman9753 thier tank is quite good on its own imo
Just that it poorly maintain and the crew lacking
@@animeee82 the SOVIETS had good (VERY good) rockets. The russians are still using rockets developed 60 years ago, and their native russian designs (Angara) are plagued with problems. And Russian R7 variants are having more and more problems as the ex-soviets retire from the program.
Fake moonlandings
@@fransschepens3 Oddly suspicius radio returns where Apollo 12 claims to have set up a radio retroreflector... Looks like a retroreflector.
These slow motion shots of the Saturn V never get old. This was truly an awe inspiring moment in human history
That was the Saturn V though.
do you mean saturn v, i mean the atlas v looks great as well
That is the Saturn V, but the Atlas V is really good too.
Ares V was going to be great, like SON OF SATURN V great.
Titan V would have been great, but Delta and Atlas were favored over Titan. Titan V would have been a hydrolox system instead of aerozene-50/N2O4, and would have had first and second stage extensions, by ten feet each. Possibly even diameter increases, perhaps to 15 feet on the first stage, much like the Titan-based Barbarian proposals.
Delta V (Not delta-v) is more or less what Vulcan will be. Vulcan could perhaps be Atlas VI.
my favourite shot of an engine firing was a slowmo shot of space shuttle engine test where the outer rim of the rocket bell had icicles on it from the super cold fuel flowing through it to cool it down, and right next to those icicles was the engine firing full throttle with a bunch of clear blue exhaust. The duality of super cold right next to almost surface of the sun hot, was super cool, and really shows just how much insane engineering goes into making these things that allows them to achieve that.
@@Michaelonyoutub
That was a throttle-down test to a minimal thrust setting. At full thrust, no icicles.
Great video.
Thank you for the explanation of the importance of Discovery and Space.
People don't know the massive impact of innovation driven by discovery and just trying to understand our universe.
These videos are always so well done. The quote at the beginning really draws your attention and sets the stage. Really just marvelous work.
I just love von Braun. Greatest man (together with Korolyov) of the 20th century. I would rather lose Gandhi than them.
I see a couple of errors here:
-1 sometimes hydrigen is referred to as H, while it is H2, as correctly reported sometimes. Some equations are also wrong, such as the one at 9:11 4H2O → 4H2 + 2O2, then 4H2 + CO2 → 2H2O + CH4, but these are kinda minor imprecision.
-2 coking in the engines is not much caused by long chain hydrocarbons, rather by alkenes and aromatic hydrocarbons, which are naturally present in kerosene. RP-1 is a highly refined kerosene that eliminates much of the olefins and aromatics, but as of my understanding it's impossible to get rid of 100% of them.
-3 The black soot you see at the exhaust of Saturn 5's F-1 engine is not caused by poorly burned fuel, but from fully unburned fuel that was used as nozzle coolant. This fuel was unburned, because it was just for cooling, so a large formation of soot is expected.
-4 You wouldn't want to convert captured CO2 back into methane because in order to do this you would need at least the same amount of energy that was obtained by burning the hydrocarbon that generated it, rendering the whole process useless. Of course, you can store it and revert it back to hydrocarbon when you have overproduction of renewables, but this is still not really recommended. The best we can do with captured CO2, as for now, is just to bury it underground and leave it there forever, using something like zeolytes or MOFs to stabilize it. Think of these as sort of a CO2 sponges.
Anyways, very interesting video.
Yeah I am surprised more people didn't catch this...I was counting my moles and they didn’t add up! Thanks for also the very detailed add'l info 👌Of course making CO2 into fuel is not a great idea in and of itself, but unfortunately there's not market for CCS currently. No one will pay for something you can't use...even if it will save civilization 🙄. So to create (kickstart) the market, rocket use is a much better idea than allowing oil companies to use it as a crutch.
@12:17 did you find an error in the final eqn for the 'Hydrogen Transport' final eqn too? Requiring 2 moles O2 for every 1 of CH4), I get: 5CO2 + 4H2 -> 4CO + 2H2O +CH4 + 2O2 compared to video: 3CO2 + 6H2 -> CH4 + 2CO + 4H2O . Both eqns are balanced...but since the product oxygen (needed for subsequent combustion) is omitted in the products I think the molar coefficients in the video are in error. Is this correct?
well than someone have to tell Elon that. ... lol. so u just use solar to convert. The whole point of "reusable" is to "generate" fuel on mars and fly back. In other words u have to find something that u can burn in a rocket motor, its no matter what u have to do for that. As long as it works.
@@mariusjansen5345 This first Mars mission is a one-way trip; they aren't coming back. What would be the point of bringing them back? They are going there to establish a beach-head and to survive for as long as they can, ensuring the next wave has a head-start. I'd love to see the psychological tests that were done on the people that were selected.
H2 as in H2O is actually two hydrogen atoms linked with 1 oxygen atom, so hydrogen is H.
Something to digest for those that doubt the practical merit of investing time and resources into this strategy may find of benefit: dozens and more new technologies are stumbled upon through projects like this, where new methods have to be developed to tackle problems that can have additional and more widespread benefit than the primary topic of study ever envisioned. I myself often run into this, where I started on one specific target, and through the development to get the primary idea off the ground, end up developing 5 or 6 new application ideas along the way which likely have more practical and widespread use then that initial project ever could encompass by itself; occasionally you stumble onto something so magnificent that switching to one of those accidental discoveries is worth abandoning or postponing the first project because of said possibilities!
Yes. Pretty similar to the ancient alchemists and transmutation chemists of the past. Wouldn't have a periodic table and other development otherwise.
Amazing work! I always throughly enjoy watching these videos. You do an excellent job discussing technical information in a manner that keeps engineers like us entertained while also explaining what it means to people who are less familiar with the subject matter. Keep it up!
The world's first rocket engine designed to be reusable- the Rocketdyne RS-25, is a liquid hydrogen/ liquid oxygen engine. I'd love to know how hydrogenization affected the engine. As I recall, the engine was designed for 25 launches. As I understand it, three of the four RS-25's being used for Artemis 1 are leftover, flight used shuttle engines
Hydrogen embrittlement is likely what puts the 25 launch limit on the engine. Spacex is trying to design their rockets to be indefinitely reusable.
The amount of research to create this video is amazing!
Reminding that it is not only googling the subject, he (and his team?) had thousands of hours studying a lot to even understand and relay the subject properly. Excellent video. Congratulations!
Ignition! is a good read on the topic of rocket fuels.
Love your explaination of the chemistry in the process!!! Thank you!
Credit goes to Barney there. New team member that we are hoping can launch a third channel
@@RealEngineering Excellent job! Thanks again and koodos to Barney!
@@RealEngineering
Shout out to Barney!
Sounds like you are a Champion among Champions!
Keep showing the light!!!
Barney didn't balance the most important equation
@@amosbackstrom5366 and what was that?
Great video! I like everything your channel puts out. But as an engineer myself, I just want to make a correction about impulse. It doesn’t represent total energy released. In this case it represents total momentum gained by the rocket due to the fuel.
Can you explain that further, please?
Sure @@ronjon7942 . Impulse is indeed the area under a force vs time curve like the one in the video. This is also equal to change in momentum over the time the force is being applied. To see why, you'd need to integrate force and the answer would be equal to the final momentum minus the initial momentum (I'll put the math at the end of my post). So fundamentally, the impulse represents the total increase in momentum due to an applied force. That increase in momentum is related to the energy gained, but it's not a direct relationship so we can't say the area under the curve represents the energy gained. You can calculate the area under the curve by taking the integral of the force function f(t) with respect to t over some initial time to a final time: ∫f(t)dt. Newton’s second law defines force as, f(t)=ma=m(dv/dt) where m, a, and v are mass, acceleration, and velocity respectively (dv/dt is the derivative of velocity which is equal to acceleration). So the integral becomes, ∫(dmv/dt)dt=∆(mv). This result is equal to change in momentum since momentum is defined as P=mv. On the other hand, energy gained by the rocket, due to the fuel alone, is equal to the rocket's change in kinetic energy (a measure of energy associated with an object’s speed). Change in kinetic energy is ∆(0.5mv^2) which you can see is similar to momentum, but the relationship is quadratic so it will not be directly related to impulse. Instead, increasing the area under the curve will quadratically increase the amount of energy the fuel provides to the rocket. I know that’s a lot so feel free to ask any follow-ups.
This is the first video that’s ever explained specific impulse in a way I understand, thanks 🙏
Wait until you hear about the Oberth effect...
I guess you don't follow Scott Manley or Everyday Astronaut then.
It's exhaust velocity multiplied by a constant. The faster you throw propellant out the back, the faster you can go on the same amount of propellant.
@@VecheslavNovikov That's only true for a rocket engine thought, for a jet engine the slower you throw the air the more efficient you are because you are pushing an external mass and the slower you throw it the more mass you are pushing against.
@@VecheslavNovikov Specific impulse is a unit of momentum per kg of fuel so if the exhaust mass and the fuel mass are the same like in a rocket engine it's just an unit of speed.
But instead of using newtons they used kilogram force. So you have to multiply it by 9.81 to convert kgF to N and get a speed in m/s
00:19 that ignition onrush of gasses that get sucked back in by the negative pressure zone/vacuum created by the rapid exhaust leaving the chamber always tickles me. Gas goes up and reverses, so simple yet wonderful.
I’ve a better feel for specific impulse after watching this. Viewing total impulse as the area under the total thrust curve really helped. Maybe after watching this a few times will help solidify specific impulse for me. At any rate, I found this video to be the best description of the metric to date. If anyone has links to links that you found helpful, I’d appreciate it. Suppose I could (gasp) search RUclips or DDG….
ISRU oxygen on Mars is relatively easy because we can extract it chemically from CO2. ISRU methane is a lot, lot harder. Its not the chemical engineering, but rather its the industrial scale mining. And with ecosystem of assembly, refuelling, maintenance and repair robots that would be needed to mine the dirt, from which to extract the water. And the MW class power supply and distribution system. Fortunately, in a realistic Mars exploration mission, the quantity of methane needed is small - single digit tonnes of methane per ascent. So it makes more sense to import methane to Mars and only produce the oxygen locally. After all, the oxygen component is 78 percent of the propellant.
The whole Mars thing is just to create hype is not meant to be realistic or fool anyone but to rich investors that can't come up with something else to through the money at.
@@lubricustheslippery5028 I'm more inclined to believe that Elon is genuinely delusional, regarding Mars at least. Btw, I love that handle :)
@@saumyacow4435 why would you consider him delusional about Mars? Just curious
@@bigcauc7530 don't bother asking them. You are looking at the modern equivalent to the news paper that published a story about how man would not fly in 1000 years. Only to have the Wright bros do it within the next month.
Sounds like they are gonna need an SMR to power this. Good thing that is on the horizon too. The engineering challenges are there but with enough effort its possible.
Mars would make a great base for mining asteroids in the asteroid belt and in Jupiter's L-3 and L-4 positions. There's possibly more hydrocarbons and water on these astroids as well.
@ARC Commander CT-420 how special would those metals or alloys be?.Could u give an e.g?
Right...mine for what? Smdh
Why, though? The extra complexity of lining up orbits for a "gas station", so to speak, could delay a mission for years and would add significantly to delta-V requirements as you suddenly have to stop around a third body and work its launch windows into the equations. Plus, we're likely a century or more before such things become economically viable as the moon and other near-earth objects will be able to provide resources to sate growing terran demand much quicker and at a much lower cost.
Did yall not see the movie evolution? Leave them meteors where they are.
My favorite interest in the space industry is in the launching and recovery process.
Things are still primitive and the years of practical experience is beginning to pay off, still have a lot of room for evolution in both realms.
Carry on.
I usually don't comment on RUclips but great video. Please make more videos that go into technical depth like this one.
I would love to learn about rotating-detonation engines! And what kinds of possibilities they will unlock for aerospace.
I second this
Thank you so much for actually admitting that carbon is not a waste product but another resource we haven’t used yet
110% on closing the carbon cycle. Storage of energy by means of liquid production will be essential long term. Cheap hydrogen production is something the oil industry can actually help with; in situ hydrogen production (leaving the carbon trapped down hole) is something that can be done, ideally powered by renewables, and pipelines could be retrofitted to allow transport. We just need the will to do it.
Finding "the will" is the hardest part of the equation, it requires good governance, building concensus, effective politicians and buy-in from both investors and the public. If it was so easy then we could have already insulated our homes, reduced our meat consumption, bought smaller cars to drive on cyclist friendly roads. We have most of the answers already, the faith in future, uncertain and often specious technological solutions can only hold us back from taking mundane but necessary steps now.
I know this attitude is less exciting, less aspirational and makes for less interesting RUclips videos (though "Technology Connections" might beg to differ), but it does provide a practical way forward.
It is not just a matter of having the will to build the infrastructure. The technologies for cost effective hydrogen production, though improving, are still at the demonstration stage at best.
Effort must continue on the R&D front, and government can support that. This is perhaps one area where our will must be focused right now. Gen IV nuclear reactors will also be so safe that I see no distinction between them and renewables. We should have no preference between the two; they will both have their contributions to give.
@@JamesGriffinT Nothing stopping 99% of people going vegan today. We millions of vegans have been vegan for centuries. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has prevented the needless breeding and murder of a billion animals by getting millions to go vegan.
Hydrogen is too large and reactive to be a fuel. In order to transport and use it, it needs to be bonded to something like a carbon atom. Otherwise the metals and plastics used as pipelines and storage containers would leak right away. It is not a matter of will, it is a matter of chemistry. It makes no sense chemically or from an energy efficiency standpoint. Hydrogen is too large and volatile on its own
@@tomkelly8827 regardless of the problem, Hydrogen is the main ingredient for producing Methane.
This was a great video, nicely summarizing the general idea. Also I highly recommened the book Ignition! even if you don't understand chemistry it is still a fun read that explains a lot about propellants and how we settled on fuels that are used most.
GOD'S STANDARD FOR HEAVEN IS PERFECTION AND ONLY JESUS (THE SON OF GOD/GOD IN THE FLESH) LIVED THAT PERFECT LIFE! HE LAID DOWN HIS LIFE & TOOK THE WRATH OF THE FATHER ON THE CROSS FOR YOUR SINS! GOD IS JUST SO HE MUST PUNISH SIN & HE IS HOLY SO NO SIN CAN ENTER HIS KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. IF YOU ARE IN CHRIST ON JUDGEMENT DAY GOD WILL SEE YOU AS HIS PERFECT SON (SINLESS SINCE YOUR SINS ARE COVERED BY JESUS' OFFERING). YOU CAN ALSO CHOOSE TO REJECT JESUS' GIFT/SACRIFICE & PAY FOR YOUR OWN SIN WITH DEATH (HELL) BUT THAT SEEMS PRETTY FOOLISH! GOD SEES & HEARS EVERYTHING YOU HAVE SAID & DONE. YOU WONT WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH HIM & YOU CANT DEFEND ANY OF YOUR SINS TO HIM. YOU'RE NOT A GOOD PERSON, I'M NOT A GOOD PERSON... ONLY GOD IS GOOD! WE'RE ALL GUILTY WITHOUT ACCEPTING JESUS' SACRIFICE FOR OUR SINS!
MUHAMMAD DIDN'T DIE FOR YOUR SINS, BUDDHA DIDN'T DIE FOR YOUR SINS, NO PASTOR/NO PRIEST/NO SAINT/NO ANCESTOR DIED FOR YOUR SINS, MARY DIDN'T, THE POPE DIDN'T EITHER, NO IDOLS OR FALSE gods DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO MUSICIAN OR CELEBRITY DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO INFLUENCER OR RUclips STAR DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO SCIENTIST OR POLITICIAN DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NO ATHLETE OR ACTOR DIED FOR YOUR SINS! STOP IDOLIZING & WORSHIPING THESE PEOPLE!
JESUS CHRIST ALONE DIED FOR YOUR SINS & WAS RESURRECTED FROM THE GRAVE! HE IS ALIVE & COMING BACK VERY VERY SOON WITH JUDGEMENT (THESE ARE END TIMES)! PREPARE YOURSELVES, TURN FROM SIN & RUN TO JESUS! HE KNOWS YOUR PAIN & TROUBLES, HE WANTS TO HEAL & RESTORE YOU! TALK TO HIM LIKE A BEST FRIEND! ASK HIM TO REVEAL HIMSELF TO YOU & HELP YOU TO BELIEVE IF YOU DOUBT! DON'T WAIT TO CRY OUT! NO ONE IS PROMISED TOMORROW! HE LONGS FOR YOU TO INVITE HIM IN, HE LOVES YOU MORE THAN ANY PERSON EVER COULD, HE CREATED YOU!
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."-John 14:6
"But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven."-Matthew 10:33
“For the wages of sin is death (hell), but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”-Romans 6:23
I remember watching it on our black and white TV. People went running out of their homes and businesses yelling "we've landed on the moon...we've landed on the moon". In 1973 we got the World Book Encyclopedia and I loved looking at all the colored images under the space section.
The variety of kerosene used in US rockets is called RP-1 (the russiana have something called T-1 that is similar) It's far more refined than regular kerosene with lower sulphur, less alkenes and a tighter distillation range to give a higher quality fuel with more predictable behaviour.
Geezuz I love this channel. Inspires me to make sure my kids pay attention to STEM when they reach big school.
Great work, as always, Brian and team.
Many people are either blissfully ignorant, stupid, or maliciously against the advancements of space, and the research of it. These people fail to realize that most of our Earthly problems center around issues that space has the resources, and logistical problem solving skills that would greatly benefit Earth in the likes of which are revolutionary, and change how life is dramatically. The hardest of problems, when solved, have always given the best fruits in solutions. This being either in ingenuity, resourcefulness, teamwork, and research. Especially when taking into account mining on foreign celestial objects, such as asteroids and planets.
good video sir, really interesting. just one clarification from a pedant chemist: at 9:04 you say that 4 moles of hydrogen are used, but if you look closely you can see that that hydrogen has no "2" at his pedice, hence I suggest you to correct it because if you leave it like this it seem like you're using radical hydrogen. also I don't understand why you didn't add the plus sign (+) in between oxygen and hydrogen generated trough electrolysis in the same set of equations; finally the CO2 at the bottom equation should have the 2 at pedice since it indicates the fact that the carbon is linked to two oxygens.
as a general rule for chemistry equations: numbers in front of formulas are normal and those indicates the number of molecules obtained, and numbers in the formulas of in front of formulas indicate how many atoms are included in that molecule hence are write smaller ( pedice).
if you need a clarification contact me freely.
have a goo day.
Hey this is what I’m learning about in my chemistry class. Just thought it was cool
Now you are talking. I like to watch this kind of engineering talks rather than some kind of weapon engineering
@Jan Krixtian especially when being used??? How can you even say that in this time of war?
@Jan Krixtian how about not talking about it like you enjoy it for starters.
I am not saying you shouldn‘t defend yourself if necessary.
That intro actually brought a tear to my eye. I miss when people talked like that man.
Please look into the reaction equations again. 9:00, 11:00 Between 4H2 and 2O2 belongs a plus and the plus sign in front of line two is not necessary (same for 11:45). The 2 in CO2 in the third line needs to be subscript. There are missing many subscript 2’s as well. 12:30 It’s supposed to be 3CO2. I studied chemistry so im automatic in such things. :D Besides that i liked the video quite a lot.
I dont get what you wanted to say with the reaction equation under “Hydrogen Transport” at 11:45… its the same like on the left side only with less electrolysis. Im confused
You are right, and the equation is not balance. 11:45 typo on both side 2nd equation, should be 4H2 instead of 4H.
(Left side 4H, right side total 8H)
The thrust-time graph looks almost exactly the same as a stress-strain diagram for a strongly strain-hardening steel
What percentage of carbon and other bits?
There are new elements out there to be made you know? Super light, super strong.
@@huwzebediahthomas9193 I wasn’t thinking of one in particular, sorry. Just the general shape of it; steel elastic region, long, upwards strain-hardening region.
@@mitchstilborn Yes I know. Great research is being done to make new elements - amazing what can be made with extreme low and high temperatures, and they are very stable at those temperatures. But fall to electrons and protons at room temperature though. 🙂
This is one of my favorite videos. I just did a science fair on this concept. Thank you for the video
one advantage of methane that you missed is that for every other fuel combination you need to insulate between the lox and the fuel or one will freeze the other. Methane doesn't need this.
It's also worth noting that SpaceX isn't the only company working on methane rockets, there are several others doing so.
The thing about methane is even compared to other paraffins like Propane, Butane and higher up, methane has to be just below LOX’s boiling point but just above the fuel’s melting point. Whereas with Ethane and Propane they boil much higher than methane but freeze at lower temperatures. Butane freezes at considerably warmer temperatures as you’d expect but Propane, being denser than methane yet more common than Ethane while being immensely more storable, would make a practical Rocket fuel.
So in short: Methane, hands down is the best performing fuel when large scale multiplanetary missions are the goal, with hydrogen being the best performing overall for more distant missions requiring more efficiency.
Propane, however is a close third, being highly practical for getting vehicles to orbit from planetary bodies of gravity higher than the moon due to better density than hydrogen or methane, but with in-between specific impulse to kerosene and methane and considerably more difficult to manufacture sustainably.
@@topsecret1837 Is propane more energy dense for it's mass? I know I've seen videos about one company (IIRC in the UK) working to build a propane powered rocket, but I thought the video talked about propane having less energy than methane
@@topsecret1837 actually, hydrogen isn't the best for deep space missions, for those you want an ion drive. Once you get to orbit you no longer need the high thrust that chemical propellants give you, and what matters more is specific impulse (modified to take into account the tank mass, not just the reaction mass)
Hydrolox is pretty good, but still only about half of what an ion drive can produce (not accounting for power supply and tank mass) and nuclear thermal engines can be even higher (same caviot applying)
@@davidelang In a sense, the video does mention how little insulation is needed at the shared LOX/methane bulkhead. For Hydrogen they didn't share the bulkhead.
Wait... So Highfleet’s worldbuilding actually makes sense using liquid compressed methane to power massive airships? And the fact that the Co2 that is expelled by thrusters into the atmosphere can be recondensed and refined back into liquid methane? HOLY CRAP THATS NEAT
pls explain?
CO2 can always be brought back to methane, but thermodynamics say that you need to put at least the same amount of energy back into the reaction. engineering says you need more energy. This process is only viable if the energy is from renewable (non CO2 emitting) sources and the original process must emit CO2, such as cement production.
@@abelknecht4943 seeing as how Highfleets world features a nuclear reactor the size of a city and hundreds of thousand+ ton airships outputting enough rocket thrust to instantly insulate a small planetoid with greenhouse emissions I still think it’s pretty neat on the worldbuilding how this all fits together
That is an incredible accent!!! It really adds to the quality of your content. Great job!
Very cool stuff. Nice to know how they're trying to work towards improving the atmosphere.
I encourage everyone to think through the "climate change consensus" that has attributed the "problem" to CO2. Several counterpoints to consider:
1. Vostock ice cores show unquestionably that past atmospheric CO2 concentrations were more than an order of magnitude greater than today (long before SUVs).
2. The atomic weight of CO2 is 44 yet the average atomic weight of the atmosphere is a smidge below 29, therefore, CO2 only exists in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere (put there primarily by volcanism). CO2 is mainly confined to the lowermost strata of the atmosphere which doesn't create any kind of "feedback loop" or what could in any way be characterized as a "greenhouse effect" (admittedly, CO2 does indeed absorb infra-red radiation which is a good thing... We'd likely freeze, otherwise).
3. The optimum atmospheric CO2 concentration to support photosynthesis is more than 4x what it is currently - if anything we should be ADDING MORE CO2 to the atmosphere instead of stupidly doing everything possible to remove it. Current atmospheric CO2 concentration is much closer to the starvation level for plants than it is to the past maximum (not even close).
4. Professor Ian Clark, et. al., have conclusively proven that atmospheric CO2 levels actually follow Earth temperature instead of the other way around - as suggested by the "consensus". In other words, that big glowy thing in the sky is primarily what determines the temperature on Earth just like it always has. The fact is that atmospheric CO2 levels adapt to temperature (with an approximate 800 year delay).
It can be argued that the only things "driven" by CO2 are bubbly beverages and plant growth. It can also be argued that the "demonization" of CO2 is more about power and control than it is about solving any kind of real problem. We desperately need to re-open the debate across all venues - only this time with all points of view given a seat at the table instead of the agenda driven echo- chamber we've had since the beginning of this so-called debate (from all sides).
Thank you for continuing to cover SpaceX and their amazing progress. It’s very appreciated.
That transition from the Topic to the Sponsor (Brilliant) was impeccable!
Amazing! Nice to see a science channel show WHY we should spend money on science. People complained about the Apollo program, not realizing how many scientific and engineering advancements we use every day today were the direct result of that expenditure of money.
You almost always get more back from the spending on science, than from any other thing.
It was mostly black people at the time who complained. "Whitey On The Moon".
Taxpayers didn't complain.
Successful carbon capture technology doesn't only hinge on reduced cost but more importantly on the high energy requirements. CCS is very power intensive and using fossil fuel power would naturally ruin CCS efficiency, whereas building out renewable power to meet our energy needs would quickly make CCS redundant. In both cases CCS as a bridge technology is only useful to the industries that promote it but not for actual climate change mitigation.
One thing to point out about the various fuels is how temperature compatible are the propellent and LOX. Liquid hydrogen is so cold that it will freeze LOX to a slush if there's a common wall. So even the "common dome" needs to be insulated. That decreases the Isp of hydrolox.
For Falcon9, the kerosene is chilled to close to LOX temperature. And liquid methane has a similar temperature to LOX, for simple, light fuel tanks.
Brilliant is not for engineers. It's for upcoming engineers. I tried it with your recommendations. I could easily solve many courses without any issue.
"Brilliant" cannot educate. They can make you feel like you've gone crazy. You can get you answers right, but they will tell you they're not, only for them to come back WEEKS later, only to offer a measly corporate apology for all the possible damage they could've done. And all thet happened in the demo before you even pay them. I doubt they're doing it any better on their paid program.
Very nice presentation. Could you make a follow-up video with ways to process Mars rock into H2, O2 and metals? Excuse my lack of chemistry - but is there a way to do something with CO?
Nothing to do with carbon monoxide or CO
I checked out a book at my university’s library which discusses different rocket fuels. Love this kind of stuff!
"Working on difficult problems to make Mars habitable will directly lead to helping solve the greatest problem facing earth today".
This is not a valid argument. How about we just, y'know, directly put the effort into solving earth's problems instead of inefficiently in a roundabout way mess around with Mars which is a complete waste of effort.
Once you get the methane, you can continue to reuse the water made from the methane making process. A one time shipment of water or hydrogen may be viable as it cancels the need to build mining infrastructure on Mars when resources are scarce.
A multitude of tanker Starship, perhaps purpose built just for this specific preparation mission, could bring not only the equipment necessary, but mainly a literal ship load of water, or if very courageous or stupid, HTP, our good old friend Hydrogen Peroxide H2O2.
@@rolfbjorn9937 peroxide tends to be extremely heavy for the amount of hydrogen it brings. Water is already extremely overweight. Problem with transporting pure hydrogen is leaks. It takes months for hydrogen to ship, and it's not guaranteed a respectable amount of hydrogen is delivered. But if you plan to also bring oxygen to mars, by all means, go ahead, but oxygen is way easier to extract on mars, and doesn't require too much infrastructure.
"Thermodynamic equilibrium is a war of attrition that the universe will always win."
- @5:49
Not just an engineering mind, Brian - quite a poet, too! Love it.
Great video, but i wouldn't say CO2 have potential. Energy is release when you oxyde something (carbon for CO2, iron for rust), like iron in a nuclear reaction, it's an high entropy byproduct.
You had to heat and pressure the CO2 and hydrogen ,aka dump a crazy amount of energy, to reverse the reaction. It's like saying an empty battery having potential, quite the contrary in fact.
CO2 is interesting as an energy storage if it's what you mean by potential.
Interestingly the reduction of CO2 to methane with Hydrogen is exothermic. So it releases energy, but this is because the splitting of hydrogen releases a lot of energy, more than needed to convert CO2 to methane.
The video is pretty clear. Potencial as a feasable fuel (as methane) for reusable spaceships going to Mars.
It's very specific to what is said in the video, use Mars atmosphere, rich in CO2 to make the Methane for the return trip. The reaction, as explained in the video, can be done in 2 ways and does need catalysts and power.
Power can be a problem and they'll likely say solar power maybe enough. Funny considering how much power can actually be produced per square meter, on Mars surface, if you can keep them clean from dust.
Wind power? I wonder if it'll survive the dust and storms.
So a lot of "ifs".
@@strix5779 Yes the reduction is exothermic, so yeah you can maybe retrieve some of the energy spend to cool down the CO2, then pre-heat and pressurize it. You can also put a streling engine next to a rocket exaust. Whatever you do, nothing is free with thermodynamic. You have to spend more energy to create the fuel than you get by burning it.
You can heat and pessure almost any organic matter (mostly water and carbon) to turn them to hydrocarbon
@@chaoswarriorbr Agreed, power is what's matter. But if you need CO2 and Sunlight, why not do it on a balloon floating in the venusian atmosphere ?
Going back to Mars, the best option is a small fission nuclear reactor.
Whatever the energy source, efficient cooling without a dense atmosphere will be an issue.
@@chaoswarriorbr Why wouldn't solar power be enough? The process doesn't need to be fast.
"... and if there's one thing I know about, it's corruption of a god given ability to do stuff with rockets."
- Wernher von Braun
"He aimed for the stars, but sometimes hit London"
Werner, remember Peënemunde
Me and the boys on our way to starve 4 billion people because Fritz Haber made some stink bombs
This is a great video, nicely summarizing so many topics & ideas.
Why would you capture CO2 from a power plant and turn it back into fuel? It would take a lot of energy to "un-burn" that CO2. If that energy is coming from the power plant, you'd have to input about 4x as much energy into the un-burning than the power plant produced in the first place. Where does that energy come from? Nuclear power? If so, why not just put that energy on the grid in the first place?
Because CO2 is a pollutant... of so the greens want you to believe.
@@VariantAEC But the point I'm making is if you're burning the fossil fuel for energy, it'll take much MORE energy to turn that CO2 back into fuel. Where does that come from? If it's from a nuclear reactor or renewables, why bother with the fossil fuels in the first place?
@@blurglide
My point is that it doesn't matter where it comes from.
If the greens suddenly adopt nuclear as the least CO2 intensive way to get electricity they will use it in a vein attempt to sequester CO2.
@@VariantAEC But if you had sufficient nuclear energy to sequester CO2 as it leaves a smokestack, then you have more than enough to just shut down the plant emitting the CO2
@@blurglide
The energy from the nuclear plant would be used to sequester CO2 in lieu of providing energy for other needs, like running a hospital or data center or whatever else normal people would be using electricity for.
This is the greens plan. So long as they see CO2 as a boogeyman they will not stop to reduce it even though it is a requirement for plant life to exist. Rather counterproductively greens would rather destroy the environment by eliminating CO2 than prevent other gaseous, liquid and solid wastes from destroying plant life.
Also remember they would stare plants all over the world to save the ecosystem which to them relies on plants being alive.
I never said the greens nake any sense.
Another reason they went with Methane is that is allows the full flow staged combustion cycle of the Raptor to work. The Merlin uses uses Kerosene and has minimal to no refurbishment required.
Indeed. It would be extremely difficult to implement in an engine that burns hydrogen, due to the enormous difference in density (and therefore frow rate) of hydrogen and oxygen.
The only other full-flow engine to reach a late stage of development was the USSR's RD-270, which burned the similarly dense (but extremely toxic) hypergolics UDMH and N2O4.
It's the other way around actually. Since they're going with methane they chose to develop a full-flow stage combustion engine. The choice of the propellants is a level above the choice of the thermal cycle because it influences your architecture a lot more.
@@spacelapsus8835 I see it as sort of a package deal. Along with the other reusability benefits of methane, you also get the relatively benign turbopump environments.
@@pseudotasuki yeah that is for sure true. However, what I meant was that you first have to settle on a propellant to then start considering the architecture of the propulsion subsystem. The choice of the propellant is governed by the type of mission you're dealing with. For example, long term missions generally (it's not always the case but it is often true) won't opt for cryogenic propellants for the final stages because of the complexity of storing at such low temperatures for extended periods of time. In this case, the choice of methane came from the possibility of in-situ extraction and the better performaces compared to RP1.
I really like it when you don't have "Insane" in your titles, better to use incredible, mind-bend or amazing, since engineering is most of the time far from insane.
I know you gotta get them clicks, but the right flavour of superlative is important 😅
@Ransford Flentjar if you go thru Real Engineerings videos you will notice that most videos about the engineering of things have Insane in their title.
Like:
The INSANE engineering of the A10 Warthog
Or
The INSANE engineering of the SR71 Blackbird
It's just getting a little old.
@Ransford Flentjar added quotation marks for clarification
Having slept on the space news for the last 3 years, I have no idea how exactly does having larger fuel tank volume negate thrust efficiency and why do we care about it negating whatever it negates
Larger tanks are heavier because they're made of more material.
Pushing more weight means the engines have to work harder, which negates the higher efficiency of the fuel.
Great video! Your reason for the importance of NASA and other space research science etc is spot on and a constant justifiable positive argument I have had for decades with those that ask those questions and don’t understand. Most people don’t know all the benefits that have come from those decades of science in their everyday lives, medical science one of the biggest, too many to name.
Go space X! And other commercial ventures!!
Good stuff as always! In an attempt to broaden people's knowledge base and critical thinking open mindedness, I recommend; Dr. Will Happen, Dr. Willy Soon, Dr. Freeman Dyson, and Dr. Nils Axel Morner.
Thanks for the well done video. What I liked most about this video is that it wasn't degraded by having to look at someone's face presenting this video.
1:10 this is a gross oversimplification. A liquid hydrogen first stage was considered, and would have been feasible to build - and would have resulted in the Saturn V weighing only 2/3 what it did. The reason they didn't go with it wasn't tank size, it was that liquid hydrogen produces much lower *thrust* than kerosene, so building a powerful enough first stage engines would have been more challenging.
can use booster like they did with the Space Shuttle. Solid fuel has the highest thrust ever so they are often used as a strapped-on boosters for lots of rockets.
@@xponen I don't think that solid fuel rockets were where they needed to be at the time, plus the US had little experience with the concept at the time the Saturn V was designed(though it's noteworthy that the Soviet N-1 also lacked boosters, despite their experience with them).
@@angrymokyuu9475 The largest ever solid rocket motor was actually fired in 1965 and 1966 (weighing about 850T, compared to the 600T for the shuttle). These were meant to be alternative first stages for the Saturn 1B, but were never flown... or even removed from the test stand after firing, they're still there.
At 14:14 it speaks of using the Sabatier process in creating storable energy. I don't get this. If you're starting point is hydrogen (presumably via electrolysis) you lose more energy creating liquid methane than creating liquid hydrogen. Liquid methane might find a use in things like ships (due to easier storage), but for grid scale energy storage, where you've got room for the insulation, liquid hydrogen probably wins.
Insulation is not the way. For every liquid, its boiling point increases with external pressure. If stored in a strong enough vessel, a liquified gas can keep itself liquid through its own vapor pressure. For example, lighter fluid is actually a gas under normal conditions, but the body of a lighter is strong enough to contain the vapor pressure and keep the fuel liquid. The lower the boiling point, the more pressure is needed to keep the liquid from boiling at room temperature. Liquid methane has a much higher boiling point than hydrogen, so it's not unfeasible to store it in high pressure tanks with minimal insulation. Besides, its molecules are a lot larger than hydrogen, so methane-tight storage tanks are much easier to make than hydrogen-tight ones; as was mentioned in the video, methane has a lot more energy per volume as a liquid, so it's more space efficient as well.
You're right that it is theoretically more energy efficient to store hydrogen directly instead of methane, but practically storing (and let alone transporting) one is way easier than the other.
@@pocarski Yeah, but to keep liquid hydrogen a liquid, even at liquid nitrogen temperature, requires extreme pressure (not going to look it up right now, but its huge).
The point about hydrogen is not transporting it. Rather you liquefy it on site and convert it back to electricity on site. Likewise if you need hydrogen for steel making, you make it on site and use it on site. Methane could have its uses, but ammonia is denser, easier to store and is being promoted as a fuel for things like ships.
Is energy efficiency the correct metric though?
If you have wind turbines turning and not enough demand to soak that up, the rest would be going to waste. From that pov an inefficient process that results in an easier to store fuel isn't necessarily a bad thing.
If you're storing fuel over multi year periods cheapness and ease of storage likely wins over efficiency of something that was going to waste anyway.
@@saumyacow4435 I've looked it up, both of us forgot about supercritical fluids. If you get a hot enough gas under high enough pressure, it becomes a fluid that blends together properties of liquid and gas. Both methane and hydrogen are supercritical at room temperature, so this entire argument is moot because both of them get properties so cursed that I couldn't find a single formula that describes them.
Hydrogen's critical pressure is 13 atmospheres, while methane's is around 45. I'm not entirely sure what that means for storing them, because I have zero idea about what happens to pressure vs density when a gas is hotter than its critical temperature.
@@pocarski Yeah, I looked it up and came to that conclusion. I think hydrogen would be supercritical even at liquid nitrogen temperature and worse, it would be fairly low density. Even so, liquid hydrogen at atmospheric pressure has its uses and I suspect there are ways to recover some of the energy used in liquefying it.
Mars actually has ice everywhere, not just at the poles. Almost everywhere has a sub-surface permafrost layer. Down to mid latitudes this is pretty shallow, just a meter under the surface, at lower latitudes it's probably deeper and somewhat more sparse. Some regions include sub-surface glaciers of high water ice concentration, as shallow as a meter below ground, and these exist even at mid latitudes in many locations. Seeking a location to site a Martian colony one would want to look for easy access to sub-surface glaciers.
Is always shocking to hear "Dr. Strangelove"... sorry, Mr. von Braun. The man that opened the skies to mankind
“My Fuhrer! I can walk!”
"I only send them up. I don't care where they come down. That's not my department, says Wernher Von Braun"....
@@saumyacow4435 In German, in English, I know how to count down... Und I'm learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun
@@mbgdemon Good.. you know the reference :)
"Space, the final frontier.."
It's not just about conquering the great expanse. It's about solving difficult puzzles. And unlocking new ways to use existing resources. Because, by the time we unlock faster light travel. The problem with pollution and climate change would have been solved.
We won't do FTL travel, since it's impossible.
@@uku4171 people thought flight was impossible then they said nuclear power wasn't possible and now look how wrong they were.
@@son_of_stan this is not comparable. FTL travel is simply physically not possible.
If we had some kind of pre-launch slingshot like a railgun of sorts we could minimize the fuel load considerably as a massive amount of fuel is spent in the first few seconds just to get it moving.
Getting it moving faster sooner means they can also make the bell more efficient by gearing it towards higher altitudes further reducing fuel load.
Not to mention the additional fuel dedicated to lift that startup fuel.
Good point, it would be interesting to see a plot of change in mass or weight vs velocity, or vs thrust, or even time. I bet the weight of that startup fuel you mentioned would be staggering.
I did not know that Hydrogen has a brittling effect on metals. Oxygen is well known for it's reactance. I really missed out on chemistry.
Hydrogen is also REALLY hard to store. Like with the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the fuel both has to be ultra high purity and wants to leak out of even sealed gas cylinders
@@greensheen8759 then how did Hindenburg keep its Hydrogen in its balloon despite being in the year 1936 for days of flight across the Atlantic ocean?
@@xponen it just lost hydrogen slowly enough that it could still maintain proper buoyancy. That application was also rather low pressure
yes but thats only true for PURE hydrogen. Mix 70% hydrogen with 30% methane and things will SENSIBLY improuve at all chapters . You can still do your much needed reactions even in a mixture of gases because methane doesnt intervene at all in them
I think the chemical equations at 9:00 (& repeated elsewhere in the video) should be
4(H2O) --> 4(H2) + 2(O2)
4(H2) + (CO2) --> 2(H2O) + (CH4)
(Using parentheses because I can't do subscripts here,
so treat all numbers inside parentheses as subscripts.)
Note 2nd equation is shown correctly at 8:55.
@12:17 did you find an error in the final eqn for the 'Hydrogen Transport' final eqn too? Requiring 2 moles O2 for every 1 of CH4), I get: 5CO2 + 4H2 -> 4CO + 2H2O +CH4 + 2O2 compared to video: 3CO2 + 6H2 -> CH4 + 2CO + 4H2O . Both eqns are balanced...but since the product oxygen (needed for subsequent combustion) is omitted in the products I think the molar coefficients in the video are in error. Is this correct?
@@2hedz77 all equations @12:17(RWGSR + SR) are balanced. But the formulas at bottom keep changing until 12:31, & I do see a problem there.
2 C atoms on left,
but 3 C on right
4 oxygen atoms on left,
but 6 oxygen on right
12 H atoms on left,
12 H on right, but that will have probably to change when the others are fixed.
. Is that what you mean by final equation?
You are right! Yes @12:31 ... total mess. But what I am saying is that @12:17 he did not include oxygen in the products. Therefore even though the equation is balanced it is wrong because one of the products is totally missed! Anyway...what a mess of a video. Not sure what happened.
As usual, graphics are excellent, and keep pace with the narrative.
Yes, I found "ignition" to be a book that allowed my fictional mind to gravitate towards profound possibilities.
Whereas, it not only gave me a clear process of the science of Rocket Fuels, but it also enlightened my creativity level to design rockets and propellents for future use.
Awesome vid thx! 💖👍
Great video, as always!
I would definitely mention synthesising fuel on Mars in the title. If I had seen that, I would have immediately clicked (instead of having to convince myself to click because I know your videos are good stuff).
Excellent run down. Recommendation: use the conjunction "and" instead of "but" if you're contrasting two statements rather than adding on.
Awesome video. You really inspired me. I am concerned with how we will get hydrogen to mars to make methane. You can't just ship it to mars because it's not dense enough to be shipped without creating complex problems. What we need is metallic hydrogen. Sadly that's about as trusted to be coming soon as fusion. It is the ultimate dream fuel.
While relatively trivial in the overall scheme of the video the reasoning for using RP-1 (kerosene) for the Saturn V is not really correct. Density is a factor but much more important is delta-v. Delta-v is the fancy term for how far a rocket can go. When you look at the equation for delta-v the efficiency of the engine is not very important in the first stage of a rocket. However the first stage is the heaviest. It so happens the thrust is inversely proportional to rocket efficiency so almost all rockets use less efficient but higher thrust engines on the first stage. I should note that it doesn't matter how efficient your first stage engines are if they don't have higher thrust than gravity you will sit on the launch pad uselessly burning fuel.
Yes, one of the reasons why methane was chosen for the raptor engine is that the full flow cycle is impossible with kerosene (too dirty) so raptor actually has more thrust than a kerosene engine.
That is what he's saying, I think. You can always add more thrust, that is never the issue. The issue is the tradeoff you're making if you add more thrust. The weight you gain depends on the specific impulse, while for volume it's density if propellant. So for the first stage, you could say h2 was not dense enough to prove enough thrust, in that: providing enough thrust would've cause the tanks to become too large. Hence they went with kerosene.
@@Merthalophor SpaceX is increasing thrust by increasing chamber pressure and not the chamber size so they are not trading anything. That's the whole point of the full flow cycle.
Denser propellants are easier to pump because the volume of fuel to pump is lower, but you can also increase the power of the pump and that's what they are doing with raptor, the turbopumps combined power is so great that chamber pressure is higher despite methane being less dense.
@@Merthalophor That's not exactly how it works. Firstly we need to think about a multi stage rocket as a series of rockets carrying increasingly smaller ones. So the equation for delta-v looks like this Δv=Ve*ln((Mi+P)/(Mf+P)) where P is the mass of the payload the stage is caring, noting that Ve=Isp*9.81. From this we make two observations: one, the performance of a stage is proportional to the fraction of mass expelled, two, using cursory limits if P is big the Δv->Ve*0, if P is small Δv->Ve*c where c is some constant.
Real Engineering's explanation for kerosene in the first stage is that the tank size for hydrogen would be too heavy. While this isn't wrong it wasn't the main reason. Now the Saturn V is almost a two stage rocket, technically it burned a small amount of fuel in the third stage for orbital insertion but that is trivial in the grand scheme of things. The second stage only had to carry the rest of the rocket into orbit where as the first stage had to carry the rest of the rocket and the entire second stage. As a result the payload of the first stage is vastly greater than the second stage. Thinking back to our limits the delta-v of the first stage is Ve*c where c is a small constant and the delta-v of the second stage is Ve*C where C is a big constant. As a result putting efficient engines on the bottom stage makes less of a difference than putting them on the stop stage.
Now the F-1 engine (Saturn V first stage) produces 6.8MW of sea level thrust. The J-2 engine (Saturn V second stage) produced 0.5MW of sea level thrust. If the J-2 has a sea level optimised nozzle you could expect about 0.8MW of sea level thrust. So to have the Saturn V lift-off you would need 43 J-2 engines. The cost savings of less fuel would be inconsequential compared to that many engines and plumbing complexity. But it gets worse, every engine has a chance of failure and engines of the time weren't vary reliable. Using our favourite binomial distribution the chance of at least one failing would be near certain.
So the biggest reason we put low efficiency high thrust engines on the first stage is because of cost savings and reliability. Mass (and density) overall is a minor consideration. Hope that helps
@@johntheux9238 Not really. Because of boil off issues transiting to mars space X can't use hydrogen. As a result they need the absolute highest efficiency to compensate because trying to get into orbit with only 300s of Isp (highest efficiency of non full-flow) is a fools errand. Furthermore full-flow is the only way to achieve high thrust and have both oxidiser and propellant enter the combustion chamber as a gas making them very reliable which is critical when you're an entire planet away. The RnD costs of developing full-flow is stupendous. No private company would willingly take it on if there is an alternative which for space X there isn't.
Ammonia Gas was used on the X-15. it is eco friendly. personally Ammonia should be used in automobiles. NH3
But using carbon in the atmosphere to make fuel uses more energy than it creates... It would aid climate change, but it wouldn't make sense as a power source
Chemical energy is easier to store than electrical energy soo it has its use cases
@@acynder1 just not for climate control, for mars
Trees 🌲 seems to be good at using CO2.
💡 Make a wooden spaceship 🚀
Thanks for your ''Inspiration'' i'm pretty sure we need it these days
My brother worked with the team who synthesized SpaceX’s new fuel, it’s the exact same formula, just with your 1 small classified change, they know as long as 1 part per 1,000 Gallon’s is different, they are allowed to market it as new fuel, & I have no idea what I’m talking about:
CO2 can always be brought back to methane, but thermodynamics say that you need to put at least the same amount of energy back into the reaction. engineering says you need more energy. This process is only viable if the energy is from renewable (non CO2 emitting) sources and the original process must emit CO2, such as cement production. Otherwise just avoiding the combustion is way better.
As far as Earth is concerned, carbon-to-fuel processes are intended to be a temporary step. Obviously the idea of capturing carbon into fuel only to burn it again seems silly, but the ability to sell the produced fuel provides a potential economic basis to cement and improve the technology. The capture itself at this point is carbon neutral so long as its power source is as well. Once further progress has been made on upscaling renewables, the cost of carbon capture can be shifted off of manufactured fuel and onto tax-funded subsidies/direct use of revenue from renewable power. Now that selling and burning the captured carbon is no longer required, all those well-established carbon capture plants can just switch to permanent storage and sequestration of carbon.
Man i love your voice and everything in your vids!! super interesting, even though I know practically nothing about engineering or chemistry :D
I hope we can use some extremely high energy density fuels like nuclear reactors here on earth but for rockets in the future.
The issue is rockets tend to explode and most people don’t like the idea of a nuclear reactor exploding in the air
@@keco185 i was using nuclear as an example of high energy density. Like a rocket with liquid fuel thats a tenth of what it weighs now. But speaking of nuclear its just so awesome to hear how in nuclear submarines the fuel can last longer than the submarine itself. Thats the power of energy density.
@@Hydrargyrum8 matter-antimatter reactions release insane amounts of energy(literally the highest density fuel possible with our current understanding of physics), the problem is, storing anti-matter is insanely difficult and so is making it
@@mastershooter64 yeah. But thats a bit too far in the future though if we are talking about simply exploring our solar system. Definitely not within our lifetime.
We do use Radio isotope Thermal Generators (RTGs) for Mars rovers and some space crafts very far away where solar power is unfeasible. Nuclear doesn't provide good enough power to weight in its current form to propel a rocket into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but could provide a means of a super efficient second stage if made light enough and able to be cooled properly.
At last the scientists came to this very obvious conclusion: "Todays' pollution is the raw materials of tomorrow, and the only two differences between a landfill and a gold mine is level of technology and business incentive".
Carbon was always a raw material and despite what he and maybe even you believe you're made of this element. I guess you are a pollutant... and so are literally all the other plants and animals on Earth. So what would we be saving?
The climate indoctrination is complete for many people. Humans bad because CO2 and widely Carbon itself is considered bad. Everything that holds your body together is primarily made from Carbon.
I guess humans forget that?
Asbestos.
👍
... and energy input. Turning atmospheric co2 into methane will require more energy than you get from burning the methane. Probably significantly so
In the beginning is that the voice of Wernur Van Beebles . . . a former NAH - ZEE ????? Yeah - us. But his ability to use paper clips saved him from doom.
Did anyone expect from real engineering to upload anything not too good?
Having tried to read Ignition, I can ask why it's so popular as it's poorly written and the author says he didn't any drafting. Since it's organized by chemical types, it jumps around between countries and eras constantly often with no explanation why said chemical was or wasn't preffered. Also he's suppose to be funny but for every one joke there's another gratitous jab against all sorts of people.
Youre a fun guy arent you
@@MrAlexs888 yeah, I make jokes about violence all the time. That's why I thought the satirical chemistry book would be fun.
Best explanation of Methane as the rocket fuel of choice
I always find it surprising to see an inspiring quote delivered by an ex-nazi. I wonder how von Braun would be considered if he gave up this ideology *today* and wanted to come help build rockets.
Von Braun never really had an ideology beyond his dream of building rockets.
He skillfully and *without any scruple* used the political environment he found himself in to fulfill his dream.
In the days of the Sputnik shock he sold his idea for the SaturnV to Kennedy just as he had sold his idea for the first big liquid fuel artillery rocket to the Military of the Weimarer Republik and later to the Wehrmacht and subsequently to the Nazis.
People often forget that von Braun started his development program for long range Missiles in 1932 under the supervision of the Reichswehr.
"I aimed for the moon, but always ended up hitting London" or something like that. Good quote
Just done successfully yesterday.........by China. First ever. 😂😂😂