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Well... If you have a hydrolox aerospike engine, what comes out of the exhaust is just very hot water... ;-)


LH2/LOX engines (and most others) typically are operated a bit fuel rich. At stoichiometric fuel/oxidizer ratio, the flame is so hot the mixture has significant dissociation, so it loses some of the chemical energy. It's advantageous to win back some of that by adding extra hydrogen, reducing the temperature slightly but also significantly reducing the average molecular weight of the gases.


And MethaLox is just very hot soda water. :)


Sparkly!




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