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

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

by Tomte • 4 years ago

168 47 4 years ago

library.sciencemadness.org

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 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.

kragen• 4 years ago

I deeply appreciate your commitment to cultivating knowledge and wisdom despite the restrictions placed on them by the ignorant.

djmips• 4 years ago

Google Books exists but it often feels like a tease since so much content is not viewable.

ranger207• 4 years ago

You're the source of that PDF? I can't thank you enough for how much I appreciate that! You, plus Dr Clark of course, single-handedly sparked my interest in chemistry, which up until that point I'd considered a boring collection of facts to rote memorize. This book convinced me to take chemistry as my last undergrad lab rather an easier course, which really opened my eyes to the fascinating and complex physics going on down there. Thanks so much for your effort in spreading knowledge of the world!

sciencemadness4• 4 years ago

Wow, time flies. I scanned this book more than 12 years ago. Here's my original announcement on the Sciencemadness forum:

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...

RF_Savage2• 4 years ago

Big thanks for scanning it and for the sciencemadness library!

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

Thank you, from another appreciative reader.

jerryjerryjerry• 4 years ago

Wow, appreciated and upvoted!

nibbleshifter• 4 years ago

There's a reprint of this available for the last few years now, I end up rereading my physical copy about once a year or so since getting it.

Always find some fun new thing to research on rereading.

jwsteigerwalt• 4 years ago

This is such an awesome book. I was delighted when it came back into print a few years ago.

WJW• 4 years ago

Ah yes, the book that many of the best rocket engineering quotes come from. I've always been partial to this one:

“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.”

b33j0r• 4 years ago

This is the passage that taught me the word hypergolic, while the book itself tried its best to teach me how to write about obscure subjects naturally.

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

Simon_O_Rourke• 4 years ago

And now this has me about to start searching for "metal flourine fires" on YouTube!

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLOFaWdPxB0

dtgriscom• 4 years ago

Obligatory reference to Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series:

https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...

Cipater• 4 years ago

Thank you so much for sharing.

aero-glide2• 4 years ago

Details many experiments with so many propellants. But right now, most upcoming rockets just use ch4 + ox.

perihelions2• 4 years ago

Most deep-space probes use storable hypergolics (hydrazines + nitrogen tetroxide). Some of the crazy parts of this book actually came true!

(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).

colechristensen• 4 years ago

The propellant tanks don’t leak, the combustion products aren’t corrosive.

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.

DylanSp3• 4 years ago

Not just deep-space probes; Dragon, Orion, and I think Starliner all use hypergols. Plenty of satellites do as well, though I think there's a trend towards using various sorts of electric propulsion. Really, the big misprediction of the book (looking at chapter 13, "What Happens Next") is that it doesn't consider missiles (and some upper/deep-space stages) moving to solid propellant; but it's a book about liquid propellants, so I'm not too surprised.

bernulli2• 4 years ago

Absolutely! I’m sure they analyzed for that, but backflow to the opposite direction of the nozzle is quite unintuitive but normal in rarefied flow, with propellant deposition next to the nozzle possible and documented [1]. Just because you point it away from the sensitive stuff does not mean it won’t get there and leave nasty traces.

[1] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a588174.pdf

DylanSp3• 4 years ago

Those experiments generally needed to be run to figure out what was possible and what the different realistic options were, though. There's also more uses for propellants than just orbital launchers; propellant for ICBMs (and other strategic missiles), thrusters for attitude control, some of the monopropellants can also be used to power APUs for hydraulics or electricity. But yes, most applications these days go with simpler, more stable fuels, especially for commercial companies that don't want to spend a bunch of extra money wrangling more sensitive fuels for a few extra seconds of Isp.

rcarmo• 4 years ago

I love this book. It is by far the most fun I've had with chemicals, and very humorously written.

RF_Savage2• 4 years ago

Gergels "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?" has a similar vibe as far as books go.

It is conveniently also available on sciencemadness, where I ran across it.

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/gergel_isop...

kqr• 4 years ago

I don't personally care much about rocketry, and chemistry is easily one of my weakest subjects. But this book hooked me early on and I couldn't stop reading. I even learned a little chemistry along the way!

Fascinating insight into a crazy part of industrial engineering history.

paulsutter• 4 years ago

I didn't see liquid methane (CH4) during my quick scan, is it covered in the book?

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)

perihelions2• 4 years ago

I don't think they were thinking about reusable rocket engines at that point in time. The primary (?) advantage of methane over kerosene is that it doesn't deposit soot on engine parts, which is highly important for SpaceX today, but not really anyone else in history.

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...

khuey• 4 years ago

The primary (?) advantage of methane over kerosene

The other big advantage of methane for SpaceX is that it can (in theory) be synthesized chemically from the Martian atmosphere.

DylanSp3• 4 years ago

SpaceX isn't the only one looking at methalox engines for reusability, though they're definitely the farthest along. Blue Origin's BE-4 engines use methalox; New Glenn's planned to be at least partially reusable, and ULA might try to reuse them on Vulcan with SMART engine recovery.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

I don't think they were thinking about reusable rocket engines at that point in time.

I think early on, the primary focus for rocket research was for missiles, and you don’t really care about reuse in those.

avmich2• 4 years ago

The primary (?) advantage of methane over kerosene is that it doesn't deposit soot on engine parts

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)

dmurray• 4 years ago

There are plenty of references to methane, but no in-depth story about systems using it.

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...

russellbeattie• 4 years ago

I bought this as an audiobook, not realizing how dense some of the chapters are. The narrator is actually great, but you need to be ready to hit the 30-second skip button a lot as he gets into the details.

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!

https://www.audible.com/pd/Ignition-Audiobook/B07CTTXLL6

baq• 4 years ago

absolutely a must read on any hacker's reading list. a great piece of writing on what you'd think is a boring topic.

jstrebel• 4 years ago

If you have the slightest interest in rockets, you should read this funny and informative book. You don't need to be a chemist to follow. I have a hardcopy at home and recommend to read it this way, as the contents are sometimes densely explained and you want to look up some additional information on the Internet in parallel.

RBerenguel• 4 years ago

I got the Audible version and it works very well, given its talkative style

WalterBright• 4 years ago

Another fine book along those lines is "Rocket Manual For Amateurs" by Brinley.

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?

sciencemadness4• 4 years ago

I didn't realize that one was rare and expensive! I have it sitting on my shelf next to the 1965 Model Rocketry manual from Estes Industries. But it looks like archive.org already has a scan, so I don't need to scan it myself:

https://archive.org/details/RocketManualForAmateursByCapt.Be...

ridgeguy• 4 years ago

I think I was 10 when I found this. The interest in rocketry it kindled has lasted my lifetime. Wonderful book! Wish I still had my copy for old time's sake.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

An HN perennial:

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

mngnt• 4 years ago

After reading this book (got a reprint from bookdepository), I am yearning for more. Not necessarily on this very topic, but in this vein: slightly technical, but easily followed even when I know very little on the subject, very humorous and personable, hands on.

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.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1• 4 years ago

Got the paperback for Christmas from my son. A great read and quite the romp through inorganic chemistry.

Amazingly low injury rate given what they were playing with.

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

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