NEWTONS 3RD LAW DOES NOT WORK IN VACUUM
Why doesn’t the propellant generate any force, it's expanding, right?
There is something known as “Free Expansion” or the “Joule-Thomson” effect, named after James Prescott Joule and J.J. Thompson two of the founders of the field of Physical Chemistry.
http://www.etomica.org/app/modules/site … ound2.html
Free Expansion states that when a pressurized gas is exposed to a vacuum the gas expanding into the vacuum without any work being done. The gas is not “pulled” or “sucked” into the vacuum nor is it “pushed” out of the high-pressure container. In other words no work is done, no heat or energy is lost.
This result has been experimentally verified numerous times since its discovery in the 1850’s.
[for example a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry from 1902: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/j150043a002]
As if Free Expansion wasn’t enough to invalidate the theory of rockets producing a force in a vacuum there is also a result from thermodynamics:
Work = Pressure x Change_in_Volume
that is easily found searching for “W=PV”
http://lsc.ucdavis.edu/~ahart/Alicia2B/Thermo.pdf
If the pressure of a system is 0 then the work done by the expanding gas into that system is 0. Gas expanding in a vacuum doing no work agrees with Free Expansion. This can also be understood as the gas meets no resistance as it exits into the vacuum and thus transfers neither heat nor energy to its surroundings. If the gas loses neither heat nor energy then it has done no work.
At this point we have a rocket with high-pressure gas generated from liquid fuel that can release the gas into a vacuum but has no way to produce a force while doing so. As soon as the nozzle is opened the gasses escape without doing any work. Therefore the 3rd Law is rendered useless.
Think anon.