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Methane is already a viable rocket fuel. I don’t think it would make sense to convert to methanol first.
by MobiusHorizons 4y ago
Methane is already a viable rocket fuel. I don’t think it would make sense to convert to methanol first.
- perihelions 4y agoMethanol is actually one of the oldest liquid rocket fuels, dating to WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Stoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Stoff I don't think it's a very good rocket fuel (it's already partly oxidized, for a start). Clark's Ignition says Nazi wartime shortages were the reason for its addition to C-Stoff -- I'll quote page 13: - "But peroxide is not only a monopropellant, it's also a pretty good oxidizer. And Walter worked out a fuel for it that he called "C-Stoff." (The peroxide itself was called "T-Stoff.") Hydrazine hydrate, N2H4-H2O ignited spontaneously when it came in contact with peroxide (Walter was probably the first propellant man to discover such a phenomenon) and C-Stoff consisted of 30 percent hydrazine hydrate, 57 of methanol, and 13 of water, plus thirty milligrams per liter of copper as potassium cuprocyanide, to act as an ignition and combustion catalyst. The reason for the methanol and the water was the fact that hydrazine hydrate was hard to come by — so hard, in fact, that by the end of the war its percentage in C-Stoff was down to fifteen."