Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972) [pdf]

This was a favorite book of mine as a child. It was one of the last books that I scanned and uploaded to sciencemadness.org. That's probably for the best, since I was still learning how to make good scans and PDFs with the early books. 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…

The book was out of print for a while, and this PDF was the only way to,read it for less than $400. But now it's back in print for $17: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813595835/ Basically the same content, highly worth reading in either format. He addresses the calamity that engineers don't read several times in the book - formulations are attempted a few years after someone proved it didn't work. Makes me wonder if a similar approach wouldn't be advisable in programming...

Apparently in the same way that computer scientists worry about "bugs", rocket scientists have to be concerned with "rats": But here an unexpected complication showed up. The peroxide was to be stored aboard airplane carriers in aluminum tanks. And then suddenly it was discovered that trace quantities of chlorides in peroxide made the latter peculiarly corrosive to aluminum. How to keep traces of chloride out of anything when you're sitting on an ocean of salt water was a problem whose…

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…