Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press Classics)

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In audiobook format, it should many of the complaints - poor scanning and the like - that going the print book. No doubt it was a great time and place to be a chemist but as he says in the intro by the early 60s all possible combinations of propellants and oxidisers had been tried and nothing much has changed since then.

Clark was an American chemist active in the development of rocket fuels back in the 1960s and 1970s, and the book is both an account of the growth of the field and an explainer of how the science works.This is a complex subject with a lot of chemical names - and few structural diagrams except when the compounds got really crazy-weird as some did; perhaps this is for the best. by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, readers will want to get their hands on this influential classic, available for the first time in decades. Clark and published in 1972, the title might at first glance make the book sound terribly dry — it’s not. His narration - and it is really a narration of What We Did And When - style is highly amusing and accessible.

There is some insight into rocket science and humor but I found it buried underneath continual lists of various chemicals with little context. later they figured that it would be even better if the missiles didn’t have to carry all its working mass and air augmented rocketry was born.It was certainly a hairy business, and one wonders what modern safe working practice would have accomplished in the time. At the time that the book was written and published, most of the work on liquid rocket fuels had been done in the 40’s, 50’s, and first half of the 60’s. The contents of the flask frothed up and then settled, frothed up and settled again, just like a man about to sneeze. In addition to illuminating the technical challenges of propellant engineers, the book is also a fascinating view into the social dynamics of the rocket world.

Parts that were mysterious before now make sense; it's striking how well the technical aspects hold up. Second, you owe me a new bomb, a new Wianco pickup, a new stirrer, and maybe a few more things I’ll think of later. He does this fearlessly as one might expect from a person now retired from his senior position with many of his more incompetent - or simply unlucky - contemporaries dead (literally). Three pamphlets: A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, There's No Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, and Kismet by Jennifer Lee Tsai have sold out. He’s got a little bit of an ego and it comes through but being one of a small group of people who got to do a bit of everything it’s deserved.You can also sign up for our Newsletter, and follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For every potential solution, there was a mountain of dead-end possibilities that tantalizingly, infuriatingly, almost worked. was remarkably liberal, with a wide cut (range of distillation temperatures) and with such permissive limits on olefins and aromatics that any refinery above the level of a Kentucky moonshiner's pot still could convert at least half of any crude to jet fuel.

Now because this is a history of rocket propellants, the book can get technical at times, but nothing that can impede a 21st century reader who knows how to use the Wikipedia.Incorporates much formerly classified information together with a handy prognostic chapter at the end.