The high-tech space programs of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson may seem far removed from the down-to-earth business of producing and processing hydrocarbons. In fact, however, the multibillion-dollar efforts by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic to normalize space travel — and maybe even put the first men and women on Mars! — depend at least in part on some pretty basic oil and gas products, including regular jet fuel, highly refined kerosene, and LNG. Oh, and hydrogen too — or, more specifically, the liquid form of the fuel that has recently caught the attention of a number of old-school energy companies. In today’s blog, we look at what’s propelling the latest generation of space vehicles.
[Note that this isn’t our first trek into the cosmos. In the past, we’ve worked with former astronaut, Commander Terry Virts (see Turn the Page), and you can be sure we talked to him when pondering this blog.]
The concept of igniting a solid fuel inside an object to propel it forward goes back to the 13th-century Chinese, who invented hollowed-out, gunpowder-filled arrows that an Italian later dubbed “rocchetto,” which translates to “spool,” for their resemblance to spools of thread. Increasingly sophisticated solid-fuel rockets — the Anglicized version of the word — were used from time to time over the next few hundred years, mostly to terrorize the users’ adversaries. (A 25-hour barrage of so-called Congreve rockets fired from a British ship toward Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in 1814 was immortalized in Francis Scott Key’s Star Spangled Banner: “… the rockets’ red glare …”). But the first liquid-fueled rocket didn’t get off the ground until March 1926, when Robert Goddard — the father of modern rocket propulsion — launched one powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen from a snow-covered farm near Worcester, MA (see photo and diagram below). It traveled about as high and far as a 60-yard field goal, but hey, it was a start — NASA says the rocket’s flight was “as significant to history as that of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.”
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