BROADCASTS.com

Rocket propellant research had its heyday in the mid-20th century, when the space race and the Cold War meant chemists had plenty of money and long leashes. Few of their most interesting ideas ended up in working rockets, but they charted new areas of chemical space, some of which, like boron chemistry, have proved useful in other fields. Geopolitical shifts, along with a growing emphasis on health, safety, and the environment, dampened propellant chemistry in the last decades of the 1900s. But the need for high-performance propellants hasn\u2019t gone away, and neither has chemists\u2019 interest in pushing the envelope. In this episode of Stereo Chemistry, we hear from chemists who lived through the heady days of the \u201950s and \u201960s and the ones carrying rocket chemistry\u2019s torch today.

A script of this episode is available here.\xa0

Music credits:

\u201cLeaving Earth\u201d by Stanley Gurvich\xa0

\u201cPlain Loafer\u201d by Kevin MacLeod\xa0

Rocket launch sound illustration adapted from NASA audio\xa0

Image credit: NASA