[HN Gopher] Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Prope...
___________________________________________________________________
Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972)
[pdf]
Author : Tomte
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-07-09 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (library.sciencemadness.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (library.sciencemadness.org)
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is such an awesome book. I was delighted when it came back
| into print a few years ago.
| WJW wrote:
| 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."
| [deleted]
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| And now this has me about to start searching for "metal
| flourine fires" on YouTube!
| dtgriscom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you so much for sharing.
| b33j0r wrote:
| 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
| jstrebel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I got the Audible version and it works very well, given its
| talkative style
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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
| paulsutter wrote:
| 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)
| perihelions wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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...
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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?
| sciencemadness wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sciencemadness wrote:
| 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.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Big thanks for scanning it and for the sciencemadness library!
| djmips wrote:
| Google Books exists but it often feels like a tease since so
| much content is not viewable.
| ranger207 wrote:
| 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!
| sciencemadness wrote:
| 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...
| kragen wrote:
| I deeply appreciate your commitment to cultivating knowledge
| and wisdom despite the restrictions placed on them by the
| ignorant.
| baq wrote:
| absolutely a must read on any hacker's reading list. a great
| piece of writing on what you'd think is a boring topic.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Details many experiments with so many propellants. But right now,
| most upcoming rockets just use ch4 + ox.
| DylanSp wrote:
| 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.
| perihelions wrote:
| 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).
| DylanSp wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| > the combustion products aren't corrosive
|
| Nitpick: if the chemical combustion is perfectly efficient,
| there are no corrosive byproducts or remainder.
| bernulli wrote:
| Nitnitpick: and we _know_ it isn't and the corrosive
| propellants _will_ contaminate surfaces:
|
| https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a588174.pdf
| bernulli wrote:
| 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
| 2143 wrote:
| rcarmo wrote:
| I love this book. It is by far the most fun I've had with
| chemicals, and very humorously written.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| 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...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-09 23:00 UTC)