During the latest Starship mission, I noticed a curious orange ring around the engine plume: My first thought was: Color of nitrogen oxides but no nitrogen fuels High temperature exhaust plume Extreme plume shock waves Disappeared above 45 km, thiner atmosphere Google reports: Themal : The exhaust plumes of rocket engines (especially those burning kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants) reach temperatures exceeding \(2000^{\circ }\text{C}\) to \(3600^{\circ }\text{C}\). At these extreme temperatures, atmospheric nitrogen (\(\text{N}_{2}\)) and oxygen (\(\text{O}_{2}\)) dissociate and recombine to form nitrogen monoxide (\(\text{NO}\)) and nitrogen dioxide (\(\text{NO}_{2}\)). [1, 2, 3] Bob Wilson
It might also be possible to just ask the chatbot for a simpler text version of the answer, using Unicode characters instead of TEX.
Well, the combustion is Methane and Liquid Oxygen and I think liquid carbon dioxide is what they're still currently using to ensure there's no fires from excess gasses in the areas between the rocket engines that have in the past been vulnerable to catastrophic fires (aka: unplanned sudden disassembly). So that leaves the metals in the engines burning (not likely) as well as the burning of the nitrogen in the planet's atmosphere (most likely). As in we're talking about a vehicle that weighs 5000 tons when fully loaded that did 0-60mph in about 2.0 seconds via a combined 8-9K tons of thrust from 33 engines. So I'm placing my bets on the engine burning nitrogen in the atmosphere prior to getting above 45km when there's way less nitrogen to ignite. As for your Google AI nonsense. Google is so incompetent with their AI they almost never give the correct answer when compared to the other major AI services and near every time someone shares the answer they got from their garbage I get increasingly more embarrassed by their incompetence, especially with what you shared.
