I take both SpaceX and Blue's methane plans as primarily reflecting
long-term plans for refueling with in-situ propellant sources.
As you point out, performancewise methane versus kerosene is a wash.
As for XCOR's non-coking kerosene tech, not magic, just one of a lot of
areas where they applied clever lateral thinking to a common problem.
Henry V
On 2/11/2018 7:40 PM, William Claybaugh wrote:
And companies Blue and X are moving to methane.
Since methane has no net performance advantage over kerosene and requires at least a “few” millions of dollars additional development cost, why are both companies so acting when they could pickup the magic kerosene IP for a few bucks?
Bill
On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:02 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
On Mon, 12 Feb 2018, Randall Clague wrote:
> I suppose you could coke any kerosene if you wanted to. Why would you
> want to? My data is that coking was never an issue with either
the 4K5
> or the 4K14...
My understanding is that this required one particular kerosene, whose
exact nature and source are still proprietary. It's not something that
others could necessarily duplicate.
Henry