(Space.com) Built by XCOR Aerospace, the test rocket packs 7,500 pounds of thrust--just a fraction of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters at 3,300,000 pounds of thrust each--but its designers are just getting started. The Mojave Desert test will provide testing grounds for the design of a much-larger, space-faring rocket.
Today's space rockets use liquid oxygen and hydrogen or solid fuels, which are hard to collect, tricky to store and very expensive. Methane, however, need not be stored at -253 degree Celsius temperatures as hydrogen must be. It's also denser than hydrogen, making more out of limited space in fuel containers.
Despite the fact that hydrogen rockets dominate the space fuel industry on Earth, methane rockets may in the distant future overshadow their molecular brethren.
With the greenish-bluish-orange worlds of Uranus, Neptune and Saturn's Titan containing an abundance of methane within their respective atmospheres, methane may end up becoming the fuel that drives our species to conquer the solar system.
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