OVER the years, it's been a common joke that badly-made or foul-tasting alcoholic drinks “taste like rocket fuel” especially if they burn the throat or mouth as they are swallowed.
Having said that, it's also been claimed since the early days of liquid-fuelled rocketry in World War II that people have drunk actual rocket fuel to get intoxicated.
Is that claim true?
VERDICT:
TRUE
Yes, people actually did drink rocket fuel to get intoxicated – and it is because the German V-2 rocket of WW2 actually used pure ethyl alcohol, the very same chemical in every alcoholic drink out there.
As space historian Amy Shira Teitel writes in an article for the magazine Popular Science, this caused a headache for the team developing the world's first ballistic missile, General Walter Dornberger and rocketry pioneer Wernher von Braun as the consumption led to a substantial loss of V-2 fuel.
“Technicians said it was inevitable; the ethyl alcohol evaporated or was spilled. But Dornberger knew better. Ethyl alcohol is the same kind that makes beer, wine, and spirits alcoholic,” said Teitel.
She writes that it was discovered that technicians around the main German rocket development centre in Peenemünde were tapping into V-2 fuel for their own enjoyment.
As the head of the programme, Dornberger had to put a stop to this fuel theft.
“The first solution was to simply add an unhealthy pink dye to the mixture, but it didn’t work. Within a week Peenemünde’s rocket scientists had figure out that filtering the dyed ethyl alcohol through an ordinary potato removed the dye and left them with schnapps,” said Teitel.
This led to the adoption of a suggestion by engineer Karl Heimburg, who suggested that a chemical could be added to the fuel that would cause diarrhoea in anyone who drank it.
However, this merely led to delays in launches as technicians were seen needing frequent bathroom breaks and in some cases, launches were severely impacted due to the sheer number of technicians calling in sick.
Ultimately, the problem was solved by adding methanol to the fuel mixture; technicians stopped drinking it once the effects of methanol to the human body became obvious after one went blind and another died.
And if anyone's wondering if it can be done today, the answer is “no” for the most part.
This is because unless it's ethanol-fuelled, modern rockets use fuels like kerosene, liquid hydrogen, red fuming nitric acid or unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine – and all are far more toxic to people than ethanol was or ever will be.
SOURCES:
https://www.popsci.com/blog-network/vintage-space/how-many-martinis-can-you-fit-inside-v-2-missile/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329851-100-myths-and-reality-of-the-nazi-space-rocket/
https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/v2rocket
