Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972) [pdf]
library.sciencemadness.org
library.sciencemadness.org
When I first started scanning and uploading books, Google Books did not yet exist. The HathiTrust did not yet exist. Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders did exist, but their focus on perfect text transcription of non-technical writing did not really suit the books that I wanted to share.
I stopped scanning books because the world largely caught up and surpassed what I could do. Between HathiTrust, Library Genesis, and sci-hub, there has never been a better time for doing deep-dive reading from the comfort of one's own living room. But I'm proud that so many people have enjoyed my scan of this book over the years.
https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=24...
I'm glad that it was so inspirational for you! If this is the only thing you've ever seen from sciencemadness, you should also check out the other books in the library:
http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/index.html
It's kind of a grab-bag of old scanned texts that I compiled from random third party sources in the earlier days of the web plus those that I scanned personally.
Also see the Los Alamos Technical Reports collection if you might be interested in oddball chemistry, physics, and material science publications from America's premiere nuclear weapons laboratory:
http://www.sciencemadness.org/lanldocs.html
Like "Chemistry of Uranium and Plutonium" -- containing both theoretical and practical documentation for the handling, processing, and analysis of plutonium in the laboratory:
http://library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/la-pubs/00...
Or "Foundations of Radiation Hydrodynamics" if your role in a nuclear weapons complex is downstream from that of the chemists and metallurgists:
http://library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/books/0041...
People do translations of the book and it's usually highly appreciated by those who doesn't read English. Excellent book. The introduction by Asimov is also awesome.
https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Manual-Amateurs-Bertrand-Brinl...
Unfortunately, it's rare and expensive.
The first page:
"If your answer to the first question is that you are thrilled and fascinated by things that burn and explode, and you love to watch fireworks displays, or you simply want to send a rocket higher than the boy next door, then this book is not written for you, and you had better find something less dangerous to amuse you."
I encountered that book when I was 9. Naturally, I had to read the rest of it! What boy could resist?
https://archive.org/details/RocketManualForAmateursByCapt.Be...
“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.”
It feels like hanging out with him through his career, and you’re glad along with him that he didn’t accidentally breathe in too much red fuming nitric acid. Math be damned, I give this book 11/10
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
2 years ago 52 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192651
3 years ago 34 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20729115
5 years ago 19 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15155394
7 years ago 29 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683778
I would especially love to read something like this on the development of the A bomb and first reactors - like the very fact that the first reactor was called the Chicago Pile, was, well, a pile of graphite, uranium, and uranium oxide bricks, 400 tons of it, under a rafters of the Chicago University stadium, in the heart of Chicago, with zero radiation sheilding and was happily runnuing for 3 months. Wikipedia has a lot, but it's mostly dry description of the basic facts and history - no zest.
In a victory of worse-is-better, SpaceX is using methane because it makes Starship/Raptor simple, cheap, and more reliable (a passive cooling system is enough to store it, storable for a more extended period than hydrogen, does not leak, does not require insulation on the fuel tank, and rocket design is simpler)
Methane makes in-space refueling easier, and methane can be produced, handled, and stored more readily on Mars. It also makes Starship rapidly reusable (unike Falcon, whose kerosene Merlin engines need to be cleaned between flights to remove soot)
Here's one reference to methane-LOX in the book ("nobody could see any point"):
- "The VfR was completely unaware of all of this when they started work. Oberth had originally wanted to use methane as fuel, but as it was hard to come by in Berlin, their first work was with gasoline and oxygen. Johannes Winkler, however, picked up the idea, and working independently of the VfR, was able to fire a liquid oxygen-liquid methane motor before the end of 1930. This work led nowhere in particular, since, as methane has a performance only slightly superior to that of gasoline, and is much harder to handle, nobody could see any point to following it up." (pages 7-8)
There's more references to methane + [exotic oxidizers], because (going off my memory) they were to trying to min-max Isp performance, for interplanetary probes, constrained to a certain cryogenic temperature range. (This predates radioisotope heaters, I believe. Not *electric* generators -- these little heater things [0]). Liquid CH₄ looked like a good match for the deep-space thermal environment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit
- "Deep space probes, working at low temperatures, will probably use methane, ethane, and diborane for fuels, although propane is a possibility. The oxidizers will be OF₂, and possibly ONF₃ and NO₂F, while perchloryl fluoride, ClO₃F, would be useful as far out as Jupiter." (page 191)
(If anyone at Google is reading this, could you consider adding search support for numerals in the superscripts and subscripts block [1]; they don't seem to be normalized in a sensible way. ClO₃F and ClO3F are entirely different searches).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscripts_and_Subscripts_(U...
Some people would disagree. AFAIK, by professionals methane was always considered first for better Isp, even though Clark dismisses the advantage.
Here's another example of disagreement, regarding virtues of hydrogen peroxide - https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html -
"It's only bad habit is that it decomposes exothermically -- and since the rate of decomposition is accelerated with temperature, this reaction can run away from you. But that hardly deserves the bad press it's gotten. LOX will also bite you, quite readily, if you're careless. "Wings" simply got it wrong. (Even _Ignition!_, while pretty sour on hydrogen peroxide due to the decomposition hazard, has the facts right, and only the emphasis is arguable -- I don't understand how someone can cozy up to ClF5 while considering peroxide dangerous; but that was Clark's position! )"
Jeff Greason (of XCOR fame, among others)
I think early on, the primary focus for rocket research was for missiles, and you don’t really care about reuse in those.
The other big advantage of methane for SpaceX is that it can (in theory) be synthesized chemically from the Martian atmosphere.
The last part of the book, attempting to predict what fuels would be popular, prescribed methane for deep space probes, for many of the same reasons you give, but failed to foresee reusable boosters or other departures from the status quo.
> as methane has a performance only slightly superior to that of gasoline, and is much harder to handle, nobody could see any point...
> For the big first-stage space boosters we will continue to use liquid oxygen and RP-1 or the equivalent. They work and they're cheap — and Saturn V uses a lot of propellant! Later, we may shift to hydrogen as a first-stage fuel, but it appears unlikely. The development of a reusable booster won't change the picture, but if a ram-rocket booster is developed all bets are off.
> For the upper stages, the hydrogen-oxygen combination of the J-2 is very satisfactory, and will probably be used for a long time. Later, as more energy is needed, there may be a shift, for the final stage, to hydrogen-fluorine or hydrogen-lithium-fluorine...
> Deep space probes, working at low temperatures, will probably use methane, ethane, and diborane for fuels, although propane is a possibility. The oxidizers will be OF2, and possibly ONF3 and NO2F...
The narrator, Jonathan Todd Ross (just looked him up) was a champ. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and there is a wide range of quality and this guy nailed it. The book is filled with so many insane chemical names it must have been exhausting!
Fascinating insight into a crazy part of industrial engineering history.
Amazingly low injury rate given what they were playing with.
Always find some fun new thing to research on rereading.
(I don't intuitively understand how the JWST has $10 billion precision optics and hypercorrosive oxidizers right next to each other, and nothing bad happens. Engineering baffles me).
Designing spacecraft is like “does this material ever outgas anything which might affect other parts? I guess we can’t use it” much less leaky propellant tanks.
Nitpick: if the chemical combustion is perfectly efficient, there are no corrosive byproducts or remainder.
It is conveniently also available on sciencemadness, where I ran across it.
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/gergel_isop...