575
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
575 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
60116 readers
1571 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So we have hydrogen as rocket fuel that does not produce greenhouse gasses when burned and they decide to develop methane as a fuel source instead! Why!?!
Each fuel has it's own use case, but in the case of reusable rockets...
Hydrogen is harder to store, it leaks out of everything. Methane can sit in a tank for a long time. Holding a tank of methane so you can relight a rocket and land after being in space for a long time is a big advantage, and keeps you from having to throw away everything each flight.
Methane is easier to store and doesn't embrittle the pressure vessel.
Every day on Lemmy is a TIL with knowledgeable responses like these 👇
Hydrogen itself is a strong greenhouse gas and leaks from everything, so it wouldn't necessarily be better.
Hydrogen requires energy to get, which practically requires fuel to be burned. Sure, you could use green energy, but you could also still build the green energy and just offset other energy demand elsewhere, which would take dirty energy off the grid.
This isn't mentioning all the issues with hydrogen, the largest probably being that it does not like being contained. It's literally just a proton and electron. It's tiny, so really nothing can contain it perfectly.