Ignition! to be reissued

[Racescort666]

Our favorite rocket fuel book is going back into print and will go on sale on May 23rd: http://a.co/0CIWrIf

Unfortunately, the original book is now even more expensive.

[sevenperforce]

I saw this, hinted to my wife about a Father's Day present, and tried to avoid saying anything on the board for fear that it would sell out.

[sh1pman]

Do want! But a hundred bucks... that hurts.

[MaverickSawyer]

Hmm... Might have to get that.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Friendly reminder that this book is available, for free (or for a tiny fee), now, from the WorldCat library system, which you can request it from to many libraries (especially university libraries). https://www.worldcat.org/title/ignition-an-informal-history-of-liquid-rocket-propellants/oclc/1005905184&referer=brief_results

YYMV of course, but you should be able to ask at your local library about the nearest library that can request from WorldCat.

It's also available from the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Bumping to let people know that it seems to have been released: https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-University-Classics/dp/0813595835/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

[Gargamel]

Manley did a bit of reading from the book.  Just from the excerpts he read, I want this...

 

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

Chlorine trifluoride...

Never brush your teeth after pickles.

Spoiler

No, children, it's a joke. Brush them always.

 

 

Edited June 3, 2018 by kerbiloid

[purpleivan]

On 5/22/2018 at 3:00 AM, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

It's also available from the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612

I liked that one of the topics it covered was "boom".

[Zeiss Ikon]

I first read this around 1980.  It was exceptional then, and it should still be.  Actual rocket science, written like popular non-fiction.

[tater]

$22 on Amazon.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

My copy has already arrived, so I guess I should review it:

Obviously, the book is hilarious. Here's a few excerpts:

Quote

Anyway, I did the performance calculations, and the results looked good — about 95 percent of the performance of straight hydrazine, and no freezing point troubles. So we made up a lot of the stuff and ran it through the wringer, characterizing it as well as we could, which was pretty well. We ran card-gap tests on it, and found that it was quite shock insensitive, in spite of all that oxidizing salt in it. It seemed to be a reasonably good answer to the problem, so we code-named it “Hydrazoid N,” and stuck it on the shelf for the engineers when they would need it.

Then, one day, I got a phone call from Stan Tannenbaum. “John, will you do some card gaps for me?” (RMI wasn’t equipped to do them, and RMI and my outfit always had a comfortable, off-the-cuff, forget the paperwork and what the brass don’t know won’t hurt them, sort of relationship, so I wasn’t surprised at the request.)

“Sure, Stan, no problem. What’s the stuff you want me to fire?” He hesitated a moment, and then, “It’s proprietary information and I’m afraid I can’t tell . . .”

“(-bleep-) you, Stan,” I interrupted amiably. “If you think I’m going to tell my people to fire something without knowing what’s in it you’ve got rocks in the head.”

A longer pause. I suspect that my reaction wasn’t unexpected. Then, “Well, it’s a substituted hydrazine with some oxidizing material ...”

“Don’t tell me, Stan,” I broke in. My subconscious had put all the pieces together. “Let me tell you. You’ve got three moles of MMH and one of hydrazine nitrate and — ”

“Who told you?” he demanded incredulously.

God forgive me, but I couldn’t resist the line. “Oh, my spies are everywhere,” I replied airily. “And it doesn’t go off at zero cards anyway.” And I hung up.

 

Quote

It had long since become obvious to everybody concerned that firing a combination in a rocket motor is not the ideal way to find out whether or not it is hypergolic — and, if it is, how fast it ignites. By the nature of research more tests are going to fail than at'e going to succeed, and more combinations are going to ignite slowly than are going to light off in a hurry. And when the result of each delayed ignition is a demolished motor, a screening program can become a bit tedious and more than a bit expensive. So the initial screening moved from the test stand into the laboratory, as various agencies built themselves ignition delay apparatus of one sort or another. Most of these devices were intended not only to determine whether or not a combination was hypergolic, but also to measure the ignition delay if it was. In construction they varied wildly, the designs being limited only by the imagination of the investigator. The simplest tester consisted of an eyedropper, a small beaker, and a finely calibrated eyeball — and the most complicated was practically a small rocket motor setup. And there was everything in between. One of the fancier rigs was conceived by my immediate boss, Paul Terlizzi, at NARTS. He wanted to take high-speed Schlieren (shadow) movies of the ignition process. (What information he thought they would provide escaped me at the time, and still does.) There was a small ignition chamber, with high-speed valves and injectors for the propellants under investigation. Viewing ports, a high-speed Fastex camera, and about forty pounds of lenses, prisms, and what not, most of them salvaged from German submarine periscopes, completed the setup. Dr. Milton Scheer (Uncle Milty) labored over the thing for weeks, getting all the optics lined up and focused.

Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, “Hold it — the acid valve is leaking!”

“Go ahead — fire anyway!” Paul ordered.

I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, “I saw that dog- eating grin on Doc’s face and shut it again,” and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.

I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, to collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul’s STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.

The book itself (I got the softcover) is nice, they made new cover art which is fine, although not as nice as the original. It does include the image of the test firing and the engraving from the original, although in the front rather than the back and in black and white rather than color. The font is a little small, but not too bad. The chemical formulas have been typeset rather than scanned, except for one, which is odd, but not a problem. There are a few typos I've notices, but nothing major, and they may have been in the original as well.

I would recommend it even if you have no knowledge of chemistry, (I have very little) since the stories are still funny and interesting.