This is one of the best technical books ever written. My review on amazon: "Rocket books are often page turners. I reviewed Sutton's "Rocket Propulsion System

This is one of the best technical books ever written. 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. ""