By Evan Ackerman
I’ll be honest, I’m posting this primarily for the video. I’ll prattle on a bit about the engine and it’s potential applications afterwards, but regardless, watching rocket engines fire never gets old, especially if you have your bass turned way up:
Hotness. Designed by XCOR Aerospace, the 5M15 engine develops 7,500 pounds of thrust by combusting liquid oxygen with methane. By contrast one of the engines on the space shuttle has nearly 400,000 pounds of thrust (the solid rocket boosters approach 3,000,000 a piece), but hey, it’s only a test engine. The big deal is that it runs on methane as opposed to hydrogen or something more exotic. There are a bunch of advantages to methane, including simpler and safer storage and lack of toxicity. But the huge reason why methane is the deep space fuel of choice is that you can find it just about everywhere in the solar system; it’s a natural gas here on Earth, it’s found in the atmospheres of all the gas giants, it’s frozen on Pluto, and there are lakes of it Titan. And even on Mars, you can easily create methane by combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen (extracted from water ice). It’s like having free gas stations everywhere you go, which is nice since AAA charges extra for roadside assistance beyond Earth orbit.
