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

Author: John Drury Clark, Isaac Asimov

Narrator: Jonathan Todd Ross

Unabridged: 9 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/15/2018


Synopsis

Ignition! is the inside story of the Cold War era search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. A favorite of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, listeners will want to tune into this "really good book on rocket[s]," available for the first time in audio.

Ignition! is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety. Acclaimed scientist and sci-fi author John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise which eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space. A classic work in the history of science, and described as "a good book on rocket stuff...that's a really fun one" by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, listeners will want to get their hands on this influential classic, available for the first time in decades.

About The Author

JOHN DRURY CLARK (1907 - 1988) was an American rocket fuel developer, chemist, and science fiction writer. In addition to his work as a scientist, he was instrumental in the broad revival of interest in Robert E. Howard's Conan stories and an influence on the writing of Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, and other sci-fi authors.ISAAC ASIMOV (1920 - 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. A prolific writer, he published more than 500 books, most notably the science fiction novels I, Robot and Foundation, and the popular science works, Guide to Science and Understanding Physics.


Reviews

Goodreads review by issa on May 27, 2018

I giggled so much reading this book that my coffee shop neighbor turned to me and demanded to know how a book clearly full of dry chemistry discussion could be so funny. The answer is easy to broadly furnish: when a motley gaggle of somewhat underfunded chemists are asked to find, somewhere on the f......more

Goodreads review by George on March 03, 2020

Informal is the right way to describe this book. The author basically gets us out for a drink and starts recounting about what he and his colleagues were up to in 50s and 60s. And with conversations between chemists like these: “Joe? You know that stuff you sent me to test for thermal stability? Well......more

Goodreads review by Ari on April 19, 2022

This is a curious book: one part memoir, one part scientific history, one part technical primer. The topic is the development of liquid rocket propellants (fuels, oxidizers, and monopropellants) roughly 1940 - 1970. This was a large intensive chemical-engineering effort. Rocket propellants have a rem......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on August 28, 2018

On some level I liked this book.....but I'm not sure how this book got such a good rating. It's not a particularly good "story", it's monotonous and dry....but is weirdly "not awful". So if you can read the following random page from the book and then think...."I'll be happy to do that 200 times more......more

Goodreads review by Brian on March 07, 2014

This book really had me giggling (descriptions of bizarre characters who were in rocketry, mentioning dioxygen diflouride in a mere aside) or gasping (ordering dimethyl mercury by the barrel). I also added a bit to my vocabulary (eutectic) and learned a heck of a lot about how difficult rocket scien......more