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

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I delayed listening to this for a long time because of other reviews as i have no scientific education (just a layman Spaceflight fan) and was worried it may be a textbook more than a narrative. The combination is hypergolic; that is, the two spontaneously ignite and burn upon contact with each other. Happily, a result of that work was this book; it captures history and detail that otherwise would simply have disappeared. The contents of the flask frothed up and then settled, frothed up and settled again, just like a man about to sneeze.

There are myriad other considerations as well; the fuel must burn at a manageable temperature (so as not to destroy the motor), the energy density of the fuel must be high enough to be a practical fuel in the first place, and so on. Most of us lack any understanding of the fact that its development was the result of a whole lot of hard scientific work, and that work required brilliance (and bravery) and had many frustrating dead ends. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Clark and published in 1972, the title might at first glance make the book sound terribly dry — it’s not. 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. However this work was undertaken in the darkest days of the cold war when there was a more complex balance of risks.

It is somewhat harder to explain how hordes of bats and the smell of skunks figure into the story, nor how the wholesale destruction of test equipment, limbs, and the occasional warehouse add humor. Bravo to the narrator, so many devilishly complicated chemical names delivered flawlessly, if he doesn't have a degree with a chemical background . For everyone else, you may still find enjoyment out of it by skimming the drier sections on details like optimum exhaust products and looking for the parts that go bang. By the time a cask of it split open and the stuff ate through several feet of a concrete floor and the gravel below, they had several tank cars of the stuff to deal with. A. ignitionpress is an outward-looking press that was set up to publish a broad range of voices from many different places and backgrounds.ignitionpress guarantees our poets at least one online launch and, depending on where you live, one in-person launch.

I build rockets for my day job, what John has done here is give us an insight into the glory days we all take for granted. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

While we're accustomed to think of technological progress in terms of Moore's law, in a few short years these engineers went from launching metal tubes small enough to hold in your hand to propelling a two ton metal capsule containing three humans all the way to the moon. There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. Please add this to the same document as the poems and ensure that your name and e-mail address are included. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise that eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space.