Voltaire had God. Rocketry has LNG. One keeps us civil, the other gets us off this rock.
A Terra Methanum Dispatch
In 1768, that arch-skeptic François-Marie Arouet—known to us as Voltaire—penned a barbed verse in response to a book titled The Three Impostors, a virulently atheistic tract that denied the existence of God altogether. Voltaire, no fan of organized religion himself, nonetheless countered with a line so deliciously ambiguous it became immortal:
“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
He wasn’t defending piety. He was acknowledging something deeper—and far darker. That humans, left without a leash, tend to revert to their rawest, most self-serving instincts. Civilization, he implied, needs its myths to keep the beasts in coats and cravats.
This post first appeared in 2020, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
That said, if there’s one realm where even the devout shed inhibition and charge headlong into folly, it’s the marketplace. Belief in miracles is alive and well there—just repackaged as quarterly forecasts and startup valuations. People want their pot of gold, no matter how many cliffs they fall off chasing rainbows. Thus the more modern proverb:
“If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
Almost always, yes. Except… once in a while, something wanders in that actually is that good. A solution masquerading as a miracle. A fix that solves too many problems too elegantly to be coincidence. It doesn’t feel real—so we ignore it. Because we’d rather cling to our cluttered toolkit than admit there might be a cleaner way.
Last week’s little detour into rocket fuels wasn’t some idle geekery. It was triggered by Crew Dragon’s elegant dance with the ISS, but the itch had been growing for years. Because rocket science, for all its grandeur, is still run like an abusive marriage between compromise and brute force.
Let’s revisit the current state of affairs. Today’s space-bound firesticks rely on two major liquid propellant combos:
- KERALOX (Kerosene + Liquid Oxygen): excellent thrust-to-weight, great for punching through Earth’s dense lower atmosphere—but a dirty, engine-clogging brute.
- HYDROLOX (Liquid Hydrogen + Liquid Oxygen): efficient, high-impulse fuel for the vacuum of space—but it’s volatile, bulky, corrosive, and fussy as hell.
Both are specialists. Neither wants to do it all. If you’re dreaming of a truly reusable, do-it-all rocket—a single engine architecture from launch pad to orbit and beyond—neither Kerosene nor Hydrogen wants to return your calls.
But Methane just might.
Enter METHALOX—Liquid Methane and Liquid Oxygen. Not the best at anything, and yet, the most promising all-rounder in the shed.
Here’s where the game shifts.
If you’re launching expendable stages—disposable boosters shot once and written off like cheap razors—then KERALOX does the job. Burn hot, blast fast, junk the mess.
But reuse changes the calculus. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: SpaceX’s vaunted reusable KERALOX boosters aren’t reusable in any meaningful sense.
Yes, we’ve all watched the boosters land heroically. But those aren’t just refueled and relaunched. They’re dragged back to the lab, surgically scrubbed, refurbished, inspected, and tweaked like antique race cars before they can even think about flying again. Time. Labor. Money.
Elon Musk dreams of rockets that turn around like commercial jets. Fuel up, quick systems check, off you go again. That’s not happening with soot-blackened, carbon-crusted kerosene engines. Those turbines are coughing up tar.
Hydrogen? Cleaner burn, sure. But it comes with its own ball and chain. Liquid hydrogen is a diva: bulky, expensive, cryogenically needy, and chemically spiteful. It makes metal brittle. It seeps through microscopic gaps. It turns storage tanks into slow-motion time bombs. Every touchpoint it contacts must be engineered to neurotic levels of precision—and priced accordingly.
Now cue Methane. Clean burn? Check. No carbon crud. No corrosive tantrums. Safer to store. Doesn’t eat your plumbing. Can be trucked in like LNG, made on-site with cheap gear, or piped in if you’re fancy. It doesn’t explode unless you work really hard to make it. And the safety bonus? If it leaks, you get a flame, not a high-altitude fireball. Try saying that about hydrogen.
And yes—if you want to win friends and virtue signal to the Green Cathedral, you can run it off biogas and call it carbon-neutral. I don’t lose sleep over CO₂, but if you’re trying to launch rockets without triggering ESG fund divestments, that might be your ticket.
So let’s tally the score.
- Methane doesn’t coke up your engines.
- It doesn’t corrode or embrittle.
- It’s easy to source and store.
- It makes reusable rockets actually reusable.
- It’s safer for humans to work around.
- It’s cheaper to build an ecosystem around.
- And it plays nice in Earth’s gravity well and in orbit.
It’s the duct tape of rocket fuels. Not pretty. Not elite. But indispensable.
Let’s go a step further.
Remember the Challenger disaster? A busted O-ring on a solid booster let hot gases escape, which ignited the liquid hydrogen tank. Cue catastrophe. That chain reaction only works when your fuel is as touchy as liquid hydrogen, which needs to be cooled to just above absolute zero. Storing hydrogen safely is like trying to babysit antimatter with a coffee filter.
Hydrogen’s tiny molecular size means it leaks through everything. It needs exotic seals. And if you don’t keep it cryogenically stable, it gets explosive. See also: the Hindenburg.
Methane doesn’t care. It liquefies at a cozy -161°C, which is practically summer vacation in space terms. Store it in vacuum-shaded tanks, and the job’s half done. It doesn’t corrode, doesn’t leak like a ghost, and doesn’t require NASA-level containment voodoo.
But all of this—the chemistry, the reusability, the safety—that’s still thinking inside Earth’s orbit.
Let’s pull back.
The real bottleneck in space isn’t tech—it’s logistics. Every bolt, every gram of water, every breath of air has to be lifted out of Earth’s ridiculous gravity well. And lifting mass out of Earth costs a fortune. It’s like hauling bricks up Mount Everest for fun.
That’s where methane becomes more than just a practical choice. It becomes the linchpin of off-world survival.
Hydrogen is everywhere in the universe—but good luck storing it. Carbon dioxide? Also everywhere, and far easier to work with. Combine the two using the Sabatier process, and you get—voilà—methane and water.
That means fuel production on Mars, on Europa, on Titan—anywhere there’s CO₂ and a little ingenuity. It means you don’t bring your return fuel from Earth. You make it out there.
It’s the first step in severing the umbilical cord.
No, methane isn’t the best at any one thing. KERALOX is cheaper. HYDROLOX is more powerful. Solid fuels are punchier. But no other fuel checks all the boxes at once like METHALOX does.
If methane didn’t exist already, we’d have to invent it.
