America prepares for a manned Return to the Moon - Artemis II / Orion Roll Out

[Ninurta]

Ninurta,

  Funny, I was just yesterday looking at the failures of systems sent to Mars.  The latest one occurred when 3I made its flyby (the MAVEN craft).

  Interesting bit about bullets and space.

Roughly a third of all of the Mars missions, including both US and Russian, have failed. That is a higher rate than any other type of space mission. There's just something about Mars....

I'm more familiar with black powder bullet propellants, because that's something I can make for myself if they close the grocery stores for my firearms, but all propellants work about the same. They all use a fuel and an oxidizer. In the case of black powder, the fuel is charcoal, which only makes up about 15% of the mixture. The lion's share of the recipe is potassium nitrate, at 75% of the mixture. That's the oxidizer. 75% is oxidizer. The other 10% is sulfur. I don't know exactly why. It doesn't have to be there for the powder to flash, but it does make it flash better.

When you think about it, a cartridge is sealed. All of the oxygen available is what was there when it as sealed, minus the volume taken up by the solid propellants, so, not much oxygen... unless... unless you add an oxidizer that can rapidly generate the oxygen necessary for the fuel in the propellant to burn at phenomenal rates.

Likewise, you can make propellant for - AHEM! - model rockets out of sugar and chlorates. The sugar, in that case, is the fuel, and the chlorates are the oxidizer.

Fun with chemistry. And Space War.

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