Talk:Aurora/@comment-73.173.51.199-20150606132459/@comment-1713205-20150609214333

If you had some kind of oxygen supply, such as maybe a decompressing spacecraft, and you had sufficient heat to ignite your fuel (leaking hydrogen gas from your beat-up spacecraft?), you could have fire. But that would only last as long as the available oxygen supply held out, giving you probably more of a jet of flame out the side of your spaceship. Fires in space work very poorly. If you had a burning material inside your ship, it would look more like a ball of tiny flame, since heat has no real direction to "rise."

This oxygen deficiency is why you cannot set fire to to eg Uranus' or Neptune's methane and burn them apart - there is no oxygen.

Nothing blows apart in exciting, spectacular Star Wars fireballs. They do look cool, but they don't work like that - not enough oxygen to create something like that.

When it comes to rockets, they can burn in space because they carry with them their own oxygen supply, the oxidizer. Smaller rockets (model and "professional hobby" types - and in other less technologically inclined uses) can use liquid rockets use LOX (liquid oxygen). Similar solid-fuel rockets can use powdered sulfur, potassium nitrate.

The Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) are the most powerful rockets in history, with the possible exception of the new one associated with the Orion vehicle. The propellant mixture in each SRB motor consists of ammonium perchlorate oxidizer (69.6% by weight), aluminum (fuel, 16%), iron oxide (a catalyst, 0.4%), a polymer (such as PBAN or HTPB, serving as a binder that holds the mixture together and acting as secondary fuel, 12.04%), and an epoxy curing agent (1.96%). This propellant is commonly referred to as Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant, or simply APCP. This mixture develops a specific impulse of 242 seconds at sea level or 268 seconds in a vacuum.

But again, to have fire, you need the triad - fuel, heat, and oxygen. Without all three, you won't get a fire.

Source: Experienced geologist.[]