Obviously on-demand electrolysis is inappropriate, but there's nothing to stop you using a smaller reactor to produce the fuel and oxidiser you need over time. After all it's going to be burnt in a few minutes, so while the GW rating may be high, it's not so many GWh. On 31 October 2013 00:54, David Weinshenker <daze39@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Henry Spencer wrote: > > At the upper extreme, big > > rocket engines typically are multi-gigawatt machines. > > Clark calculates the kinetic power of the Saturn V first stage > exhaust as about 41 gigawatts... this is on the same scale as > the outage of the Eastern Interconnection of the North American > power grid in August 2003. (Approximately 60 GW of generation > capacity was initially tripped off line - IIRC, roughly 40 GW > was still out of service a day later.) > > -dave w > >