I guess at this point one of the bigger advantages of methane, or hydrogen for that matter, is that you can still keep making them easily enough with out fossil fuels. So in the longer term future there's probably some reasonable prospects for those fuel types from that.
Space, Rockets, Satellites, oh my!
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Not really. We just have a lot of experience designing methane gas turbines because of all the natural gas powerplants that were built.
And the fact that SpaceX picked it for Muskian Mars aspirations, and then the engineers that work a few years there to pad their resumes take that experience with them when they leave for greener pastures at other companies.
If space launch is eating up enough global hydrocarbons to even show up on the pie chart, then you have the flight rate to justify infrastructure based alternatives like beamed power.
SpaceX isn't the only company that shifted to Methane or Hydrogen in recent decades. And regardless of it not contributing much, it's still yet one more factor to account for eventually.
So I still think it's useful that these can be resolved more neatly. Why choose more pollution after all?
Yeah a lot of Chinese company and even the state are shifting to Methane as well.
Long March 9 superheavy lift rocket are now methalox resuable rocket which look similiar to Starship (but potentially made with aluminum).
Currently leading Chinese company that are on course to build China first Falcon-9 size resuable rocket are also using methane. Which is the case with Landspace, who just also happen to be the company that launch first methalox rocket into orbit.
Then there is the most popular dedicate engine maker in China JZYJ whose Longyun-80 methalox engine can be found in many upcoming resuable rocket both from state sector and private sector.
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Yeah. It's pretty good choice if you're doing a single fuel booster and upper, there's existing experience form LNG power plants, and it makes common domes and cryodensification easy.
It's a good propellant. But it's not some magic bullet like pop sci reporting likes to make it out.
You also have to keep in mind that space launch is small enough as a sector and quite risk averse, so you get a lot of 'follow the leader' behavior.
It was 'known' back in the day that SRB boosters and hydrogen uppers were the best way forward.
Then it was 'known' that SSTO was the future of space launch.
It was 'known' that commercial providers simply could not provide a cost effective launch service.
The current crop of heavy launchers will work, but do not take that to be vindication that there aren't potentially better alternatives.
It's a good propellant. But it's not some magic bullet like pop sci reporting likes to make it out.
You also have to keep in mind that space launch is small enough as a sector and quite risk averse, so you get a lot of 'follow the leader' behavior.
It was 'known' back in the day that SRB boosters and hydrogen uppers were the best way forward.
Then it was 'known' that SSTO was the future of space launch.
It was 'known' that commercial providers simply could not provide a cost effective launch service.
The current crop of heavy launchers will work, but do not take that to be vindication that there aren't potentially better alternatives.
Obviously it isn't, though I'm not sure who you're really talking to in this thread with this comment. I do not think anyone claimed it was exceptional, like all the other fuels it's a trade off between various factors.
To give some considerations that can go in to choosing what to use as a fuel in a rocket.
Awhile ago I did read that methane was a bit harder to keep stable then some other fuels though and so a bit more of a detonation risk inside the engine. Though I guess with increasing expertise and better modelling capabilities that is less of a risk then it once was. Another issue is obviously that high efficiency fuels tend to give less good thrust to weight ratios on engines, thus why hydrogen engines historically were often paired and still at times are paired at launch with SRB, just so there is some more force lifting the rocket up in the first minute or two. Fortunately over the decades technology has apparently advanced enough to make engines light enough and performant enough to make quite powerful methane engines, a factor that might also be contributing in current interest in it. Especially as I believe for now hydrogen engines still seem to be more limited there. Still historically speaking this would have thus made methane engines less interesting.
Some other factors beyond those two would be that methane can be made a liquid in a temperature range pretty close to liquid oxygen, which means you probably don't need different equipment for it. The similar temperature range means you don't need to make two fully separate tanks either, but can just make one larger tank with a barrier in it, this allows for a small weight saving, which is nice for a rocket. It's a bit more efficient then kerosene as well of course, though still well short of hydrogen. And as I mentioned before, one can easily enough make it synthetically in the future, so it should have a better long term future as a fuel then a fossil fuel derived one.
As a last potential longer term consideration, there is one more efficient and potent fuel cycle that one could use to burn things. Which would be to detonate the fuels, this has for a very long time been a big problem to do effectively though, but recently some advancement have seemed to make rotating detonation engines practical options. How ever I've heard those only so far work with hydrogen and methane, so they're some what limited fuel wise. Still they are supposed to give a reasonable boost in rocket ISP, though I've not really heard a solid figure on how much, but based on various things I did run in to I'd guess it would probably be somewhere in the 5-15 percent range. A boost that large would be quite substantial, though for now I only know of NASA having created a functional demonstrator. Still as such this might in decade be used to squeeze out a final improvement in chemical rocket engines efficiencies then.
In any case, I hope this helps clarify for you that rocket fuels are thought about in some more depth here then just basic pop-sci levels of knowledge.
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Yeah, hydrogen's achilie's heel is it's low density, which means hydrolox rockets have proportionally more tank mass and this dings their total dV on the (Mdry + Wet)/Mdry part of the rocket equation.
Now, the detonating engine part is not quite right... in the context of rockets.
A RDE will not meaningfully improve the specific impulse of a rocket because that's a function of the temperature of combustion and mass of exhaust products and that's all limited by the chemistry of the propellant.
What an RDE rocket does do is allow you to drastically reduce the size and weight of the turbopump assembly because the pressure addition step is handled by the detonation wave. This means you could in theory have pressure fed rockets that perform competitively with turbopump fed ones, saving you quite a bit of money.
It's actually for air breathing propulsion that RDE increases efficiency, because the bulk of the power generated in a jet engine is actually syphoned off by the turbine to power the compressor. Because the RDE removes the need for high pressure compression, more of the fuel's energy can go to moving air and thus creating propulsive force.
This doesn't match what I've heard and read on the topic. I did fairly quickly find this video from Scott Manley quickly that discusses how part of the work available in current combustion cycles isn't being extracted and how thus there is an amount of energy that can still be extracted by a detonation engine. This is also summarized in this graph, where one can see that in a modern rocket engine that uses constant pressure using the Brayton cycle, that one can get less work then if one uses a constant volume cycle like the Humphrey cycle. Getting more work out of the same fuel is obviously an efficiency gain.
In short, detonation engines can use a more efficient thermodynamic cycle.
As a more real world demonstration, this article on RDE also notes ISP improvement:
'The experimental research showed that compared with liquid rocket engines based on isobaric combustion, rotating detonation rocket engines can work stably at a lower equivalence ratio, and the specific impulse is increased by 6%-8% under the same combustor size and injection conditions, and the advantages of rotating detonation combustion mode are verified by experiments.'
Of course the simplifications that a detonation engine allow which you highlighted would be nice gains as well, but they as such do actually also actually grant real efficiency gains as well. And considering how hard getting even half a percent gain now would be in current systems, this is actually a fairly substantial one, and probably the last major boost we'll ever be able to get.
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Rocket Lab launches fourth set of Kinéis satellites
Rocket Lab launched a fourth set of satellites for French company Kinéis Feb. 8 as it extends its lead in the small launch sector.
spacenews.com
Boeing warns SLS employees of potential layoffs
Boeing has notified employees working on the Space Launch System program that up to 400 of them could lose their jobs.
spacenews.com
Well this is way sooner than I expect, I guess they have been working a lot behind the scene.Two selected proposal from Chinese tender for low cost cargo spacecraft. Apparently with target of >1.8 tons cargo to Chinese Space Station.
Haolong-1 space plane will be launch this year aboard Landspace's Zhuque-3 (notable due to the fact that this is essentially one of the more important mission entrusted to private sector). Qingzhou disposable cargo spacecraft from Shanghai microsat will also launch this year aboard CAS Space Lijian-2.
China to launch 2 new space station cargo spacecraft on commercial rockets in 2025
HELSINKI — China will launch a pair of low-cost space station resupply spacecraft this year on new commercial launch vehicles, highlighting advances for the country’s space ecosystem. The missions …
spacenews.com
If Haolong launch and carry cargo to Chinese space station before Dreamchaser it would be kinda epic…
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Blue Origin launches 'Perfect 10' space tourists on New Shepard rocket (video)
"Every crew has a special crew name, and this crew has named themselves a Perfect 10. Well, that makes perfect sense to me, considering the fact that this is, in fact, our 10th human flight."
- Location
- USA
Virgin Galactic to start assembly of first new spaceplane in March
Virgin Galactic will start assembling the first of a new generation of suborbital spaceplanes next month with commercial flights planned for mid-2026.
spacenews.com
Blue Ghost has successfully landed on the moon. Congrats to Firefly and NASA!
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896117316326244674
https://x.com/NASA/status/1896118330421088306
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896125390386606333
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896117316326244674
@Firefly_Space 2025-03-02 0836 UTC said:
https://x.com/NASA/status/1896118330421088306
@NASA 2025-03-02 0840 UTC said:We're baaack! 🌕
Blue Ghost has landed, safely delivering 10 NASA scientific investigations and tech demos that will help us learn more about the lunar environment and support future astronauts on the Moon and Mars.
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896125390386606333
@Firefly_Space 2025-03-02 0908 UTC said:Would you look at that view! #BlueGhost captured its first image on the Moon that embodies everything this bold, unstoppable Firefly team has worked so hard for over the last 3+ years. And we're just getting started! Find out what's next for #BGM1 at 4:30am during our press conference with @NASA
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Up...date? At least now we know where it's going.
Space mining company AstroForge identifies asteroid target for Odin launch next month
"Odin's role is to gather critical imagery of the target asteroid, preparing the way for our next mission, Vestri, which will aim to land on the asteroid and begin extraction."www.space.com
So only one out of three?
SpaceX rocket launches private moon lander and NASA 'trailblazer' to hunt for lunar water (video)
If all goes according to plan, the Athena lander will touch down near the moon's south pole on or around March 6.www.space.com
Lunar Trailblazer, Odin spacecraft suffering problems after IM-2 launch
Two spacecraft, one from a startup and the other built by a major aerospace company, are experiencing problems after their launch as rideshares on a lunar lander mission.
spacenews.com
A lot of these missions to the Moon haven't had the best of luck lately, wonder if it's some early experience problems.
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Intuitive Machines lands near lunar south pole, but fate of private Athena probe unclear
Athena is on the moon, but mission team members are still working to understand its situation.
Europe's Ariane 6 deploys spy satellite in first full mission
Intuitive Machines's second lunar lander has made it to the moon, but unfortunately IM-2 appears to have followed in the footsteps of its predecessor by falling over onto its side again...
spacenews.com
Maybe they should rotate the payload 90 degrees next time, so that it's pointed right side up after landing. /jk
IM-2 lunar lander on its side after touchdown
The second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines reached the surface of the moon March 6, but its status after landing was not clear.
spacenews.com
Article: At a briefing about three and a half hours after the Athena lander reached the south polar region of the moon on the IM-2 mission, executive said the lander was "somewhat on its side" although its exact orientation remains uncertain.
[ . . . ]
It wasn't clear what caused the spacecraft to land on its side, but Altemus and Tim Crain, senior vice president of Intuitive Machines, said laser altimeters were providing some "noisy" data during testing in lunar orbit. "It just remained noisy all the way until touchdown," Crain said. "That's where we're going to look as we investigate what impact that might have had on the system
[ . . . ]
IM-2 is the second mission by Intuitive Machines, both flown as part of the NASA CLPS program. The IM-1 mission landed on the moon in February 2024 but hit the surface faster than expected, snapping a landing leg and causing the Odysseus lander to fall on its side. The company was still able to operate the lander for about a week, collecting some data from its payloads.
Maybe they should rotate the payload 90 degrees next time, so that it's pointed right side up after landing. /jk
Article: Multiple people familiar with the White House proposal said cuts to NASA's "Science Mission Directorate" could be as high as 50 percent. These sources emphasized that no decisions are final, and there are some scenarios in which the cuts to NASA's science programs would be less. But the intent is to slash science.
Well Trump and Musk are looking to slash any sort of science NASA could do down to the bone.
That would certainly be a very disappointing outcome, as science was one of the best parts of NASA.
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Update.Intuitive Machines's second lunar lander has made it to the moon, but unfortunately IM-2 appears to have followed in the footsteps of its predecessor by falling over onto its side again...
IM-2 lunar lander on its side after touchdown
The second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines reached the surface of the moon March 6, but its status after landing was not clear.Article: At a briefing about three and a half hours after the Athena lander reached the south polar region of the moon on the IM-2 mission, executive said the lander was "somewhat on its side" although its exact orientation remains uncertain.
[ . . . ]
It wasn't clear what caused the spacecraft to land on its side, but Altemus and Tim Crain, senior vice president of Intuitive Machines, said laser altimeters were providing some "noisy" data during testing in lunar orbit. "It just remained noisy all the way until touchdown," Crain said. "That's where we're going to look as we investigate what impact that might have had on the system
[ . . . ]
IM-2 is the second mission by Intuitive Machines, both flown as part of the NASA CLPS program. The IM-1 mission landed on the moon in February 2024 but hit the surface faster than expected, snapping a landing leg and causing the Odysseus lander to fall on its side. The company was still able to operate the lander for about a week, collecting some data from its payloads.
Maybe they should rotate the payload 90 degrees next time, so that it's pointed right side up after landing. /jk
IM-2 lunar lander mission ends
Intuitive Machines says its second lunar landing mission is over after concluding the toppled lander cannot generate sufficient power.
spacenews.com
Ouch, that's rough. RIP Athena.Update.
IM-2 lunar lander mission ends
Intuitive Machines says its second lunar landing mission is over after concluding the toppled lander cannot generate sufficient power.
Hope they work out the problems with the altimeter in time for IM-3.
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Also, in news about rockets that don't explode:
Ariane 6 successfully completed its first commercial flight.
Ariane 6 successfully completed its first commercial flight.