Hypothetical situation:
Let's say your space budget was under immense political pressure to
contain costs. Let's say that 90% of the out-of-pocket cost for a
launch, excluding the "sunk costs" is in liquid H2. This is not far off.
H2 itself, made from methane, is relatively cheap but it is
extraordinarily expensive to liquefy, and to keep in that state -and
those $$ are out-of-pocket, for every launch. If this were not so, NASA
would be sending up many more shuttles than they do now - as the
hardware was designed to be used more often than is done.
Let's say that using liquid methane and liquid O2 would be great from a
cost standpoint, but the isp -- the specific thrust which is available
from your (already in-place) launch-vehicle engines is too low with this
fuel combo. You can make minor changes to the vehicle but not major.
Is there an any happy medium which would save about half or more of the
out-of-pocket cost for a payload?
That would be where the hypothetical species: poly-oxygen (diozone
specifically) would come in.
Even if it were not stable (too risky) to store as a pre-manufactured
liquid, it is possible that it could be made 'on the fly' from liquid O2
fast enough to be used in a modified engine, in order to burn LNG hot
enough to get the same isp, as the alternative, but at a small
percentage of the out-of-pocket cost.
The key add-on would be an inline reactor subsystem, which would use
high pressure O2 which has already been used to cool the rocket motor
and then after polymerization - vent the diozone back into the motor.
This reactor would, of necessity, contain an intense UV source in the
critical spectrum of 254 nm. It would likely need to be a coherent
source of UV light.
O2 becomes extraordinarily reactive under 245 nm radiation, and would
entropically "seek" to become more stable in such a situation (on paper
by taking on a new structure). We do not know if - and how far - R&D for
this effort has gone, but there are thinly disguised hints:
http://www.aculight.com/Downloads/NASA%20SBIR%20Contract.pdf
Anyway -- under this spectrum of irradiation, it is (arguably) possible
that diozone is the favored species to be formed from high pressure O2
in a 245 nm UV coherent field, and also that its lifetime of stability
as a bound-ring exceeds the transit time to the rocket engine. That is
pure speculation - maybe it is pure BS <g>.
All I can say for sure - is that if this scenario were even remotely in
the ball-park of accuracy, then NASA would have already been on it, like
the proverbial stink-on-you-know-what. No bull.
Jones
