A Real Sugar High!

A Real Sugar High! Oreo's Used as Rocket Fuel
Food contains an amazing amount of energy. It fuels our bodies and makes us tick. What would happen if that same food Were placed in a rocket, imagine the energy it could produce...

A king-size Snickers has 541 Calories. That’s Calories with a capital “C,” or 1,000 lowercase calories. A small-“c” calorie represents the energy required to heat one gram of water by one degree Celsius. So that Snickers could theoretically heat a gram of water 541,000 degrees or, more realistically, bring a gallon and a half of water from nearly freezing to nearly boiling.

The energy in food is typically released when, through a complex biochemical pathway, sugars, starches and fats react with oxygen from the lungs. It’s a form of slow-motion burning that, thankfully, rarely involves fire.

ut you can liberate the same amount of energy in much less time by mixing the Snickers with a more concentrated source of oxygen—say, the potent oxidizer potassium perchlorate. The result is basically rocket fuel. Ig­nited on an open fireproof table, it burns vigorously, consuming an entire candy bar in a few seconds with a rushing tower of fire. If you could bottle the energy of kids playing and turn it into a Molotov cocktail, this is what it would look like.

Of course, you can’t actually fire a rocket with a Snickers bar; the nuts would clog the nozzle. Oreo cookie filling, however, works very nicely in standard model-rocket engines. (Caution: The Model Rocket Safety Code does not approve of filling rocket motors with highly reactive chlorate-Oreo mixtures.)