The Best Performing (and most dangerous) Chemical Rocket Ever Tested: Rocketdyne Tripropellant

TOOK ME A COUPLE MONTHS TO LEARN but oh my god I am so ecstatic that a person like you has even seen my content. your videos are so damn awesome and researched to an incredible degree. to have one of my piss poor videos in your description is nothing short of an awesome honor. KEEP IT UP MAN!!! LOVED THE SHUTTLE VIDEO!!!!!

When asbestos is one of the least alarming components of your setup, you've accomplished something truly amazing.

Dimethyl mercury? I momentarily lost my ability to control YT, accidentally closed the window and just sat there saying "wtf" for a minute. That infamous nightmare fuel poisoning case wasn't on the skin, it was through a latex glove.

You know it’s really hazardous when they knew it was hazardous in the 60s

I have a few personal rules I live by. As an Air Force program manager, my number one rule is "Never let an engineer get bored" Please dear god, if you work with or around engineers take this to heart. This video is the kind of stuff that happens when you let engineers get bored.

I can just see the project review meetings. NASA management: what the hell did you guys do? We could never use any of this! Rocketdyne engineers: well you said to make the engine with the highest ISP ever, you never said make the engine with highest ISP ever that DOESN’T kill everyone in a 5 mile radius

the issue of pumping molten lithium through a rocket in-flight is left as an exercise to the reader...

I'm a military systems engineer, former infantryman, and parachutist & jumpmaster. Your comment about reduicng dangerous operations to tedium really hit home. Boring is often very good ...

You know it's cool when an asbestos cladding is the safest part.

Fluorine: "Yo dawg, I heard you got electrons."

I think the PPE that was recommended in "Ignition" was a good pair of running shoes.

PhD chemist here. Whenever I find a mistake, I will write it into this comment. 7:15 You made a mistake saying that the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen follows the formation of ions first. The reaction is in fact using a radical chain mechanism. 17:50 It doesn't decompose back into fluorine. It gets deprotonated, turning into F-, and then reacts with calcium to form CaF2, which is basically insoluble in the environment of the body. So basically, it pulls calcium out of everything that needs calcium, including your bones and the synapses of your nerves. That's why you treat a HF injury with calcium gluconate injections into the affected area. To give the fluoride something to attach to instead of, you know, the calcium you actually need. 32:40 You refer to the experiment being done at Aperture Science. This is in fact wrong. Tests like this were performed in the Black Mesa research facility. 33:20 At my old university, we would discard of pyrophoric old chemicals also by shooting them. We had a concrete block in the courtyard of the building, and hit them from a safe distance with a pellet rifle. Typical substances were things like tert-butyllithium. In small scales, this is actually pretty safe. 35:50 Regarding LiF's impact on the enviroment. It's likely that the fluoride will just precipitate as CaF2 once it hits water. The little bit of calcium dissolved in water, limescale for example, is enough to precipitate it. As to the lithium, it's basically harmless in small concentrations. 37:10 "A couple of drops to your skin might be fatal", is actually depicting it in a too harmless way. The chemist you're talking about was killed by it after less than 1 drop of it soaked through a protective glove. HgMe2 is one of the chemicals I will ever refuse to work with, and I've so far seen some weird dodgy shit already. 42:50 Uranium hexafluoride isn't gaseous at ambient conditions, it's a white solid. Those gas centrifuges operate under a partial vacuum at slightly elevated temperature. Tungsten hexafluoride is gaseous at ambient though. Additionally, UF6 usually isn't made using F2, instead, ClF3 is used. 49:20 Are you sure the radial cutting torches use thermite? My bet would be that they're a form of thermal lance, using oxygen gas and a metal. That concludes my list of mistakes found. Here's a few extra comments: 1. Your opinion about the square cube law showing up everywhere is the truest statement ever made. 2. I wonder if we could use the exhaust heat of an radioisotope generator, RTG, in a deep space mission to keep the lithium molten. Or, alternatively, use a lithium-sodium-potassium alloy to reduce the melting point. EDIT: Typo and correction from "glucamate" to "gluconate". That was an error caused by autocorrect I think. Or a brainfart of mine. Thanks for the correction anyway.

I worked at Rocketdyne for several years starting in the mid 70's. There was some interesting stuff.

32:33 "The nuclear reactor, laser research facility, plutonium lab, and other experiments at Aperture Scien-uuuhhh I mean S.S.F.L." I'm rolling... XD

TL;DR, a tube of unimaginable violence with a rocket nozzle on the end

Extremely well put together video, glad the VHS upload got used for something. It is aggressively 90's. With youtube we can share our suffering with others.

I am currently pursing a chemistry degree while working as a part-time firefighter. This video seems to be designed entirely to scare me.

That rap was so fire, it burned through 10 inches of steel reinforced concrete and then 6 feet of gravel.

My chem prof @ SU in the '70's recounted a similar barrel shoot at Oak Ridge way back in the day. Copper was being rationed so they fiddled with sodium filled iron pipe as a potential substitute for heavy power buss bars. In the end the full barrels of sodium were rolled down a hill into a pond while being shot at in motion. He recounted it as the best fireworks he'd ever seen, esp. if done at night.

When the meltdown occurred I was 2 months old and my family lived 1/2 mile from the reactor. Rocketdyne did not notify the residents nearby, there was no evacuation. My sweet grandmother died of stomach cancer from drinking the well water. We found out about the meltdown and other crimes 20 years later. I've had severe undiagnosable health problems most of my adult life, while Rocketdyne continues doing business! What a world we have made for each other!!