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NASA Announces Enviromentally Friendly Jet Fuel
drama writes "From the Press Release: 'Two years of collaboration between Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., and NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have led to the development of a non-toxic, easily handled fuel made from a substance similar to what is used in common candles. The by-products of combustion of the new fuel are carbon dioxide and water; unlike conventional rocket fuel that produces aluminum oxide and acidic gasses, such as hydrogen chloride.' Or for pictures and more info, visit the site."
Woot! I feel sorry for all the bees that NASA will be milking, just to make enough rocket fuel for the next launch..
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"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Just like petroleum! How environmentally friendly! (sarcasm aside, this is a step forward from existing fuels, but ecotopia it ain't)
They should just fill it with coke and shake it then take the lid off sending it into orbit. Sometimes the simple solutions are the best.
One of those would be a gigantic step towards a better environment. Unfortunately, this isn't it.
Cheap and clean is the key to colonizing the solar system. When it costs relatively little to lift people and habitats into orbit is when the mass migration to space will begin. Environmentally friendly exhaust is a nice bonus that will help disarm Green opposition to such ventures.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
The story says jet fuel, but the article says rocket fuel. There's a big difference, isn't there?
If it was jet fuel, and it was cheap enough to make Nasa could sell the rights to produce it and become more self sufficient. If it's rocket fuel though, there would be much less of a market and would really only benefit them.
There are ways of dealing with CO2 emissions that we're not currently taking, but that we could. One of those involves injecting CO2 into oceanic depths where it's likely that it will remain in solution.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Slashdotting (DDOS) a .gov site can get you 20 years to life. Chrisd, you're about to be classigied as an enemy of the state.
And it does make you wonder how many cars = one booster when it comes to total emissions produced... I'd say, a couple million, on top of all the heat waste you dump into the atmosphere. I want to see an environmentalist chain himseld to a rocket >:)
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Granted, a rocket launch probably belches out a LOT of these chemicals, but there is a launch how often? Not very often, last I recall. The polution they produce is negligable compared to the total polution cars produce.
NASA should be spending this money on more important endeavors, such as the ISS or perhaps even another moon trip. Blowing money to produce environmentally safe rocket fuel is stupid and inefficient.
First off: current rocket fuel also lets off C02 so this stuff is at least better than what they're using in that that is _all_ that it lets off.
Second off: it all depends on what the fuel is made from. If it is made from some biomass then it lets off only as much C02 as was recently absorbed from the atmosphere by the plants that it is made from. If it is made from fossil fuels then it is introducing new C02 that hasn't been around for millenia, a serious shock to the global balance.
Third off: C02 from rocket launches isn't nearly as big a deal as it is from cars and heavy industry. It is a drop in the bucket, comparatively. Rockets probably don't have much of a global impact. The problem is the local impact of the toxics that they do let off which directly affects the area surrounding the launch site.
This is NOT a jet fuel, this is a component of a rocket fuel.
In fact, jet fuel is highly refined kerosene, or what the Brits used to call "parafin oil" - because it is a relative of the parafin wax used to seal canning jars, and MAKE CANDLES!
This fuel is a solid form of parafin that, when combined with a liquid or gaseous oxidizer makes a rocket.
The idea is this:
a purely liquid fuel rocket has 2 liquids you have to handle, the oxidizer and the fuel (e.g. LO2 and kerosene, LO2 and LH2, etc.) That's twice as many hoses, twice as many turbopumps, twice as much to go wrong.
A purely solid fuel rocket has no liquids, but once lit off, it will burn until all the fuel is gone. You cannot throttle it down, stop it, or restart it - the best you can do is eject it.
A hybrid rocket uses a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. You can throttle it by varying the flow rate on the oxidizer. You can stop it, and restart it again. You still need some tubing for the oxidizer, and a turbopump, but only one.
However, I doubt the only reaction products from this are carbon dioxide and water - more likely you are going to get unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and water.
Granted, that's nicer than what the SRB's on the Shuttle use - aluminum and ammonium perchlorate IIRC.
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Actually, paraffins are a broad class of hydrocarbons not just the familiar candle wax. Paraffins are characterized by having unsaturated C=C bonds, whereas olefins are all saturated C-C bonds. Not sure what kinds of paraffins would have the kind of energy density they would need for rocketry level thrust, maybe aromatics?
As a ChE, this is cool. But the really interesting part is the oxidizer (which they give no details on) and the nozzle. Vapourizing and mixing must be amazingly fast.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
How do you figure that carbon dioxide is any-toxic? It seems to me that all the ways it could hurt you are pretty obviously not chemically disrupting bodily function. For example, it could suffocate you by displacing breathable air but the same goes for water and pillows.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Or it cuts the flight time from New York to San Francisco to about 90 seconds.
when people started talking about 1 launch a month or 1 launch a week, the amount of chlorine that would be placed in the upper atmoshpere whould be enough to destroy the entire ozone layer in a few decades. The only comparable natural phenomena is a volcanic eruption which puts even more chlorine (and other acids) into the upper atmoshere than a shuttle launch.
with china, japan, north korea, europe and boeing all coming on line as rocket launch systems this is going to be increasingly important. Of course not all of these are solid fuel rockets (the culprit).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
First of all, NASA has a LONG way to go before it has a launch frequency high enough for any pollution from their launch vehicles to be significant.
Second, there are plenty of rocket designs for liquid rockets that already produce only water or water and CO2; so an "environmentally friendly rocket" is not a new thing. The Saturn V, for example used Kerosene for fuel.
What is significant news for nerds is that this is work on a hybrid rocket design. Hybrid rocket motors are interesting because they combine some of the benifits of solid and liquid designs... but that probably wouldn't be considered newsworthy to mainstream media outlets. So, my guess is that this NASA center wrote up a press release and stuck in the magic words "environmentally friendly" to get the news to give them some coverage. The fact that we don't need eco-rockets yet, or that other minimally polluting rocket designs have been around for over half a century are irrelevent because the people they are selling themselves to don't have a background in rocketry, don't bother to check their facts, and many of them feel happy inside when they think they are helping to fund something that protects Mother Earth. And meanwhile the pros and cons of hybrid rocket designs (and probably the things that the test program was really supposed to find out) don't get any attention at all.
Call me when they are testing cubane fuels.
The web site is short on details. They are saying that this new motor has the ability to throttle down and reignite. Depending on how well it can do this, you might be able to replace liquid rockets altogether.
t s/aiaa-hr.pdf, which doesn't indicate that it needs to be cooled, and says the specific impulse is about 20% better than kerosene. I'm assuming they mean Kerosene/LOx and not Kerosene/H2O2.
Also, they are talking about scaling the technology up from the demonstrator to space shuttle size with only a slight size penalty. This is all good, except they didn't mention the specific impulse of the fuel vs. the current solid boosters.
Much better info can be found at http://thomasc.stanford.edu/research.html, which suggests that this "solid" mixture must be cooled to keep it solid. However, a better source is http://store.aiaa.org/images/about/02_TC_Highligh
I would still like to see numbers on this stuff.
As for liquid fuel, the upper stages of the Saturn V and the main Space Shuttle engines burn H2 and O2, producing nothing but pure water. OTOH, most liquid fuel rockets on unmanned boosters burn nasty chemicals like N2O4 and UDMH (because they were often derived from ICBMs, which you want to keep fueled all the time, so no cryogenic fuels.)
At any rate, if it can burn, some rocket has used it as a fuel. Find out more here and here.
You want to bet?
Jet-A fuel is basically kerosene. Kerosene when mixed with an oxidizer is a rather commonly used rocket fuel. Guess what fueled the Saturn V.
Of course this story is talking about solid rocket fuel, which makes the headline just as incorrrect as your comment.
This is a new type of solid rocket fuel. Current high-grade solid rocket fuels use aluminum powders and such like. All jet fuels already produce "only" CO2 and water on combustion, as do many popular liquid rocket fuels (such as LOX/LH2 and LOX/Kerosene, the two most popular rocket fuels for launch vehicles).
To use this in automobiles. That would put a stake in the hearts of those in the middle east (assuming it's not oil based).
John Carmack, are you out there?
Can this fuel be used for amateur or semi-professional space ventures? Does it give any advantages over using, say, Peroxide fuel? How does the energy release/pound compare?
I know Peroxide is pretty nasty stuff, so it would be cool if a safer to handle alternative came down the pike.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
At any rate, if it can burn, some rocket has used it as a fuel.
Cats?
Oh please, please, please say yes.
Meeeeeeoooooooooooow!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
According to a quote in this press release, the parrafin-based engines can be throttled, shutdown and even restarted, all of which are impossible with current solid-rocket motors.
And then the ocean becomes one big bottle of seltzer...what clown came up with this idea?
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For those wondering why this is getting funded, or whether rocket exhaust has significant environmental effects, I found an interesting page floating around:
http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/background.html
some highlights:
--
Saturn V Rocket (1975)
Due to a malfunction, the Saturn V Rocket burned unusually high in the atmosphere, above 300 km. This burn produced "a large ionospheric hole" (Mendillo, M. Et al., Science p. 187, 343, 1975). The disturbance reduced the total electron content more than 60% over an area 1,000 km in radius, and lasted for several hours. It prevented all telecommunications over a large area of the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon was apparently caused by a reaction between the exhaust gases and ionospheric oxygen ions. The reaction emitted a 6300 A airglow. Between 1975 and 1981 NASA and the US Military began to design ways to test this new phenomena through deliberate experimentation with the ionosphere.
Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)
Part of the plan to build the SPS space platforms was the demand for reusable space shuttles, since they could not afford to keep discarding rockets. The NASA Spacelab 3 Mission of the Space Shuttle made, in 1981, "a series of passes over a network of five ground based observatories" in order to study what happened to the ionosphere when the Shuttle injected gases into it from the Orbit Maneuvering System (OMS). They discovered that they could "induce ionospheric holes" and began to experiment with holes made in the daytime, or at night over Millstone, Connecticut, and Arecibo, Puerto Rico. They experimented with the effects of "artificially induced ionospheric depletions on very low frequency wave lengths, on equatorial plasma instabilities, and on low frequency radio astronomical observations over Roberval, Quebec, Kwajelein, in the Marshall Islands and Hobart, Tasmania" (Advanced Space Research, Vo1.8, No. 1, 1988).
Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985)
An innovative use of the Space Shuttle to perform space physics experiments in earth orbit was launched, using the OMS injections of gases to "cause a sudden depletion in the local plasma concentration, the creation of a so called ionospheric hole." This artificially induced plasma depletion can then be used to investigate other space phenomena, such as the growth of the plasma instabilities or the modification of radio propagation paths. The 47 second OMS burn of July 29, 1985, produced the largest and most long-lived ionospheric hole to date, dumping some 830 kg of exhaust into the ionosphere at sunset. A 6 second, 68 km OMS release above Connecticut in August 1985, produced an airglow which covered over 400,000 square km.
During the 1980's, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45 meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer)
Wrong!
GRAPH: the atmospheric concentration of CO2 fits a logistic sigmoid curve. Logistic sigmoid curves are typical for most nonrenewable resource consumption.