Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972) [pdf]
library.sciencemadness.org
library.sciencemadness.org
My review on amazon:
"Rocket books are often page turners. I reviewed Sutton's "Rocket Propulsion Systems" a few years back. I picked it up as a cure for insomnia, and ended up reading most of it in one night. The nice thing about rocket science; it's not really "rocket science." If you have a background in physics or chemistry, rocket science is a perfect level of semi-light reading. There is chemistry, neat, but conceptually simple thermodynamics, mechanical engineering and materials science. None of it is at a really high level: rocket science is the type of thing you could do on a slide rule. People did.
This book has a similar quality; it's pretty easy to read (though I confess I bogged down a bit in some of the chemistry sections). I didn't read it for the science, though. I don't really care about rocket fuels. I learned the basics about rocket propellants from Sutton. It's conceptually simple "look at the periodic table" stuff. This book is about the implementation details, and how they were discovered. I don't plan on building any rockets any time soon, so it's more or less irrelevant to me. I suppose this could be helpful to folks who might have some ambitions to make some fancy rockets, but are too precious to use LOX and Kerosene or dinitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine.
Mostly, I read it because it's uproariously funny. Research involving physical objects is funny. Why is it funny? Because at the end of the day, we're really just dumb monkeys playing around with forces we only partially understand. Rocket research has some of the highest comedic potential because it involves smelly things which explode. Had I only known this, I would have arranged to have been born in the 1920s, so I could do all the cool research that happened in the 1950s. Alas, the heroic age of rocket fuel research is now over.
Still, we have these anecdotes, which are unique, and possibly eternal. To quote the book, "if you, gentle reader, have never seen a nervous rocket mechanic, complete with monkey suit, being buzzed by nine thousand demented bats and trying to beat them off with a shovel, there is something missing from your experience. ""
Rockets have a very fine line between a successful mission and failure. That means you've got to understand the math, do the math correctly, and understand and account for the limitations of the mathematical models.
Otherwise your rocket will be too heavy to fly, or will explode/disintegrate when flying.
Some other good rocket reading: "V2" by Dornberger
See also https://archive.org/details/gergel_isopropyl_bromide
And it's not like they didn't know at the time how toxic this crap was. They just didn't care.
It's criminal to limit it to people interested in rocketry. It's also fascinating to anyone interested in chemistry, engineering, history, and plain "stuff going boom", one of the Internet's most hilarious stories (Derek Lowe's "Sand won't save you this time") is essentially a straight excerpt from Ignition!, on Chlorine Trifluoride:
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
And frankly, just open the PDF and look at pages 2 and 3, if that doesn't convince you the book is worth reading I'm not sure you have a soul.
Plus it's a very short book, the body itself clocks in at under 190 pages.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...
If you're a reader who can tolerate a memoir, and are looking for something a little different, I have no hesitation recommending ignition.
The intro by Asimov was a delight to read.
is the set of all things worth more than about £10.
Luckily my university library had one so was able to read it. Worth it.