The highest-performing rocket engine ever tested burned molten lithium with cyrogenic fluorine, plus added hydrogen for some light reaction mass.

This has never been developed for actual flight, in significant part because it's terrifying.

BTW if you enjoy rocketry history or the Things I Won't Work With blog, I highly recommend the book /Ignition!/

It's an informal history of the development of rocketry propellants. Contains explosions and a whole lot of frightening chemistry.

library.sciencemadness.org/lib

And if you haven't heard of Things I Won't Work With, it's an (infrequently updated) blog by a research chemist on substances frightening enough that he doesn't want to be in the same lab as them. A common thread is compounds that would *really* prefer to be nitrogen gas and will energetically turn into such if given the slightest opportunity.

blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/

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