Advanced rocket engine combustion devices operate in a highly dynamic thermochemical environment that challenges the material research community to provide solutions to heretofore unsolved technical problems. The paper outlines a range of needs and corresponding operating environments that typically exceed the melting temperature of most materials, imposes heating and cooling rates measured in thousands of degrees per second, provides cyclic, highly oxidizing, and reducing combustion environments often found side-by-side, including nonequilibrium gas compositions not readily producible in the laboratory.

The stringent design requirements for minimum weight, impeccable quality control, and high reliability most often make the material cost contribution a secondary factor in relation to the total end-item cost. This provides new opportunities for the use of ultra high-tech material/material processing that would ordinarily be rejected for economic reasons.