this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Even space agencies hate dealing with hydrogen despite the extremely high fuel efficiency, because it's a nightmare to handle and requires ridiculous design compromises in rockets. Hydrogen-fueled rockets have a limited number of times they can be loaded and unloaded (for example, scrubbed launches due to bad weather) before the hydrogen embrittlement makes fuel tanks too compromised to use safely.
The Columbia disaster happened because foam insulation (needed to keep the hydrogen a liquid in warm Florida weather) came detached from the big orange propellant tank and smashed heat shield tiles. That kind of insulation just isn't needed with propellants that stay liquid at higher temperatures, such as kerosene (very common) or methane (more recent but gaining popularity). The whole space shuttle design was wildly unsafe for numerous reasons and it's a miracle that more astronauts didn't die in them.