How Do You Make Rocket Fuels?

because ammonia is nitrogen with three hydrogens on the outside, so now, for the actual

rocket

fuels

, uh, nitrogen tetroxide. that starts with ammonia and then you basically oxidize it again, so you start burning it in the air with a catalyst. You actually don't want it to accelerate too quickly, you end up producing nitrogen oxide from this and then oxidize it further into nitrogen. nitrogen dioxide and then when nitrogen dioxide is cooled it naturally forms in pairs producing dinitrogen tetroxide, just like that, like normally nitrogen tetroxide when it's in solution or when it's stored, it's actually a mixture of nitrogen dioxide of nitrogen and dinitrogen tetroxide and it kind of transitions back and forth depending on the internal energies and the temperatures, well, finally we have the hydrazines, so hydrazine is two nitrogens with four hydrogens on the outside and this is made through the Olin Rashid process, so hydrazine, if you think about it, resembles two atoms of ammonia, like if you took two atoms of ammonia, cut two of the hydrogens and joined them together, you would get hydrazine and that's exactly how This process works. ammonia and mix it with sodium hypochlorite, which is the active chemical in chlorine bleach.

You know, if you have a pool that you've been adding chlorine to, you may be using sodium hypochlorite. Do this at a temperature of about 5 degrees Celsius and what happens is the chlorine gets to the ammonia, it displaces a hydrogen atom and you get chloramine, which is nitrogen, chlorine and two hydrogens, the hydrogen gets to the sodium site and you get sodium hydroxide, so after running it for a while, then you add a lot more ammonia and you increase the temperature to about 130 degrees Celsius and what happens is the new ammonia starts to like it, the chlorine comes off, the hydrogen comes off and you end up producing hydrazine water and sodium chloride salt and that's how you get your hydrohydrazine now if you want to

make

monomethylhydrazine or asymmetric dimethylhydrazine, the first step is basically executed the same way, it's the second step where you add, instead of adding more ammonia, you start adding methylamine or diethylamine, which basically already have the methyl groups attached. and that's how these chemicals are produced, so look, this is a very basic walkthrough.

I'm not a chemist and I know there are a lot of chemists out there who say, well, it's not as easy as you said. I know it's not that easy. Like I said and I really want to hear how complicated this really is because we in spaceflight don't necessarily appreciate the enormous amount of work that has to be done by the chemical industry to fly these

rocket

s. I'm Scott Manley. fly safe thanks