In world first, China’s LandSpace methane rocket sends satellites into orbit

FlyingSquid , 7 months ago

Don’t we not want to add methane to the atmosphere?

JohnDClay , 7 months ago

The majority of methane added is from ground support. Idk if it ruins fuel or oxidizer rich, but if it’s oxidizer rich, virtually no methane will come out the engines without being burned to co2 and water.

FlyingSquid , 7 months ago

We don’t want CO2 either, do we?

JohnDClay , 7 months ago

Methane is like 16x worse, but yes. It might be feasible to make methane from atmospheric capture though, (much easier than kerosene) which would make it net natural.

partial_accumen , 7 months ago

Counterintuitively, methane fueled rockets enable a pathway to have carbon neutral rocket launches so we wouldn’t be adding any CO2.

FlyingSquid , 7 months ago

How does that work? The methane is collected from carbon-neutral sources?

partial_accumen , 7 months ago

Nope! Instead its possible to pull gaseous CO2 right out of the air, and turn it into methane. Pretty wild, eh? The principle it works on is call the Sabatier Reaction.

FlyingSquid , 7 months ago

Interesting! Thank you!

Blue_Morpho , 7 months ago

It’s a gigantic improvement over hydrazine rocket fuel used by rockets like SpaceX’s. Hydrazine is poisonous. A methane leak is dangerous but not immediately deadly.

partial_accumen , 7 months ago

It’s a gigantic improvement over hydrazine rocket fuel used by rockets like SpaceX’s.

SpaceX doesn’t use hydrazine or any other hypergolic fuels in its rockets (the one exception is the emergency engines on the Crew Dragon capsule used for humans, but these engines have never been used in crew flights).

Older rockets in China (like the Long March 2) or Russia (like the Proton) still use those toxic hypergolic fuels for the main boosters.

homesweethomeMrL , 7 months ago

Great.