Of missiles, and hydrogen...
I've been mulling this over, and decided to post a question, or rather a statement on here to see if any more intelligent/learned ppruners can answer me...
We all know that soon, the worlds supply of oil will run out, or at least become so expensive to get out of the earth that drilling becomes pointless. At this point, we must stop using Aviation Fuel.
So, the fuel of the future as far as I can tell, will be Hydrogen. Clean, easy to find etc etc, all very good. However, although it can be used to fuel aircraft engines, it has a major problem, in that it takes up around 3 times as much space to store enough to go, say 100 miles, as it would to store enough petrolium based fuel to go the same distance.
In aircraft this means larger fuel tanks, whereas in rockets this means, surely having to make a missile larger to gain the same range.
For example, a hydrogen propelled short range missile akin to a AIM9 would have to be more the size of an AIM54 Pheonix... with all the disadvantages of weight.
My question to the engineers knocking around here is simply... to what extent am I correct, and if I AM correct (doubtfully) what other options are there?
Note: All information i've been working from is that which is available all over the internet. As you can probably tell this is not from experience, I am simply curious.