this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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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!?!
Methane is easier to store and doesn't embrittle the pressure vessel.
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.
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.