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You just sent me on a long detour searching for the book he references: "Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John D Clark For any o
by smaddox 11y ago
You just sent me on a long detour searching for the book he references: "Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John D Clark
For any other people interested, it's out of print, but a PDF is available here: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
- hyperion2010 11y agoIgnition is an absolutely wonderful book, I send it to everyone I meet who thinks they want to be a scientist. It is also absolutely hilarious.
- pjc50 11y agoIt's fantastic, an alternating mix of dry chemistry and hair-raising lab anecdotes. For those who haven't read it: in the post-war early rocket period, government chemists could tell from basic stochiochemistry what mixtures might make good rocket fuels. But their other properties had to be tested experimentally. Especially hypergolicity and detonation resistance. There's a long subthread about red fuming nitric acid, which would make a great oxidiser once people could find a way of stopping it eating through stainless steel tanks.
- sokoloff 11y agoAmazon's buy box for Ignition! right now is a used copy for just over $14K. They don't even throw in free shipping either... http://amzn.to/1TsIA9c http://amzn.to/1TsIA9c
- ethbro 11y agoHa! Then we did the same thing today. I was trying the print-on-demand references I found, but those companies seem to have been absorbed by / transformed into ProQuest, who not longer has a print-on-demand service that I could find.