I intended to write about rocket fuel. So, how did I end up writing about “ayahuasca,” a hallucinogenic brew originating from Indigenous Amazon traditions? Well, here we go.

A few years ago, I was walking through the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s giant display hangar in Virginia, already awed by having seen the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and the SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest airplane. Then I turned a corner and my jaw dropped! There sat the Messerschmitt Komet, one of Nazi Germany’s “wunderwaffe” or “wonder weapons” that I had often discussed in lectures because of the chemistry that propelled the world’s first airplane powered by a rocket engine. Basically, the Komet was a piloted missile.

Every rocket is driven by a reaction between a fuel and an oxidizing agent that may be oxygen itself or a chemical that can release oxygen. The combination produces hot gases that are then expelled rearward from the engine. According to Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which in this case means that the rocket blasts forward. It was the chemistry of that blast that prompted my discussing the Komet in class.

The Komet’s fuel was a mixture of hydrazine and methanol and the oxidizer was hydrogen peroxide. When these are combined, there is an instant exothermic reaction with the products being nitrogen gas and water vapour. Such a reaction that requires no ignition is said to be “hypergolic.”

The Komet was capable of achieving a speed of 1,100 kilometres per hour and was designed to defend against slow flying bombers that were like........

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