Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook]

Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark

While the author describes this as an informal history and claims to write for a general audience, I found this was stretching my, admittedly somewhat rusty, O-level chemistry knowledge – his idea of the level of education of ordinary people may show some misalignment.

That said, there is plenty of fun to be had in this book, following the development of different potential fuels, their advantages and dangers, with plenty of unexpected explosions, or ‘hard starts’, along the way.

I had naively assumed that all rockets were powered by hydrogen peroxide, it being obviously chemically easy and with harmless waste products. It is true that it is used for some rockets, but there are many other choices, broadly of two types, fuel and oxidiser, and monopropellant. Where a fuel and oxidiser are used a hypergolic (self-igniting) mixture can do away with the need for an ignition system.

When I hear about people spending three or four years developing a rocket fuel I start to feel less bad about spending a few weeks on my automations – I know there is a lot of work involved in getting the depth of understanding of chemicals needed to use them safely and reliably as rocket fuels, but I’m pretty sure my brain couldn’t focus for that length of time on a single subject.

In summary, this is rocket science, and if you come out of it with all your limbs intact you probably didn’t push the boundaries far enough.