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I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.


I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)


pV=NRT

Pressure and temperature are not independent.

"Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".


I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.


Run your engine inside said refridgerator?




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