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A review by mburnamfink
Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John Drury Clark
4.0
Sometimes, it actually is rocket science. Clark was a leading liquid fuels scientist from the 1950s to the 1970s, and this book is a hilarious collection of anecdotes organized around rocket fuels. On the one hand, rocket fuel isn't that hard. Tsiolkovsky figured out that liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were pretty much as good as chemical fuels can get, and they're used in high performance applications today. But LOX and liquid hydrogen are horrific to work with, and as rockets move from applied science experiment to key military technology, fuels have to get a lot less cryogenic and volatile. Hence, people like Clark, and billions of dollars of research into hydrazine, nitric acid, boron compounds, and more exotic chemistries.
Clark is a great story teller, and when he injects human interest, abound funding, lab explosions, and horrible ideas like mercury based rocket fuel, the book is quite good. But it's organized by chemistry, rather than chronologically, so expect to spend a lot of time with reaction diagrams and wandering in the forest of alternatives abandoned because their freezing points were too high, density too low, or they simply failed to ignite reliably.
I want to close with the famous quote about, Flourine Trioxide, the best part of the book.
“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.”
Clark is a great story teller, and when he injects human interest, abound funding, lab explosions, and horrible ideas like mercury based rocket fuel, the book is quite good. But it's organized by chemistry, rather than chronologically, so expect to spend a lot of time with reaction diagrams and wandering in the forest of alternatives abandoned because their freezing points were too high, density too low, or they simply failed to ignite reliably.
I want to close with the famous quote about, Flourine Trioxide, the best part of the book.
“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.”