Friday, January 24, 2025

Environmentally Friendly Hybrid Magnesium Rocket

I had previous proposed an all Magnesium Solid Rocket. Now I am improving on that idea. I propose the use deionized water or hydrogen peroxide as the oxidizer. The solid fuel is pure magnesium. Magnesium when heated reacts violently with water (check videos in internet). Water can be stored in either liquid or ice form. Water may contain some hydrogen peroxide to improve the performance. Magnesium is a light weight and strong material. It can be extruded to form the stage with the fuel itself. It would withstand the rocket combustion pressure without needing another material. All magnesium solid booster stages would have short specific impulse times so more than 2 stages would be used in the rocket. 

Magnesium melts at 650° Celsius which lowers the cost of extrusion of the stage. Therefore, the rocket should slowly accelerate not to have a high surface temperature. Magnesium is also a poor heat conductor and only heated magnesium reacts with water. Therefore, the casing covering the water or ice can also be made from magnesium. For the stages that throttling is not that critical ice can be used. For other stages water can be pumped to adjust the throttle. An all Magnesium stage would be released before its casing cannot withstand the inner pressure. The left-over stage would than keep burning including its casing using the oxidizers in the atmosphere. The stages that are released in space would heat up during entry into the atmosphere and burn before reaching the ground. Therefore, only the nozzle sections of the stages would be left over. Because the nozzles withstand high temperatures they need to be shattered into small pieces before hitting the ground. A mechanism should be created to accomplish this task. Magnesium water reaction yields Magnesium hydroxide which doesn't have negative effect on soil and sea water given that they would be scattered in large areas. If the nozzle is made mostly out of Graphite, the overall space debris impact on the environmental would be close to zero.

Le Barcarès Space Base I proposed is close to Spain which has Magnesium reserves. Therefore, the rocket can be built with minimum carbon footprint. The energy required to build it can be generated from the wind farm located in the sea. 

The result is a low cost, minimum carbon footprint, environmentally friendly (compared to other technologies), minimum exported raw material requiring Space Rocket.

A small version could be easily designed and tested!

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