Word: oxygenate
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What fuels do the Russians burn to make their Sputniks fly so fast? Wild rumors last week gave them credit for wonder-working superfuels. Not necessarily. Conventional rocket fuels such as kerosene and liquid oxygen, if skillfully used, could do the job. But superfuels are coming along-in both the U.S. and Russia...
Most people think of fuel as something that gives off heat when the carbon in it combines with oxygen from the air. Chemists have wider horizons. A fuel means any combination of substances that reacts chemically with a release of energy. The ingredient that "burns" may be a metal or a compound containing a metal. The "oxydizer" may be oxygen-rich, or it may have no oxygen at all. The test is the yield of propulsive energy, which scientists measure as "specific impulse...
When chemists dream their fanciest dreams, they imagine powering a rocket with liquid hydrogen and liquid ozone (03). This pair is tops for energy. Its reaction has a specific impulse of 373. The specific impulse of the traditional kerosene-oxygen combination is only...
...keeping down the rocket's size and frontal area. Ease of ignition is almost a must. The best combinations are "hypergolic," igniting spontaneously as soon as mixed. Bad qualities to be avoided are toxicity, corrosiveness, heat instability (exploding when hot) and a tendency to evaporate like liquid oxygen. No fuel is perfect. Beryllium compounds might be good if beryllium were not so scarce and so poisonous...
...colleague, "doctors thought that prematures just die and that's all." Dr. Ylppo was determined to change this. As early as 1913 came a study of jaundice from blood destruction, which sometimes afflicts the newborn. By 1917 Ylppo had passed a tube into his own stomach and pumped oxygen in to prove that the life-essential gas could be given by this route (he was the first to apply this technique to "preemies"). Then came detailed studies of the physiology of preemies (showing just what development handicaps they suffered), and other vital topics, such as the effects...