Ignition!

An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

By: John Drury Clark, Isaac Asimov - foreward

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Ignition! is the inside story of the Cold War era search for a rocket propellant that 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 that eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space. A classic work in the history of science, listeners will want to get their hands on this influential classic, available for the first time in decades.

©2018 John Drury Clark (P)2018 Random House Audio

you don't need to know chemistry.

hilarious anecdotes about explosions and government contracting. if you don't know any chemistry at the start you'll know some at the end.

A Fantastic Read

This is a classic and very fun history of liquid rocket propellants up till 1970ish. it contains some chemistry but I think you can enjoy it even if you only have a decent high school chemistry background. You definitely should look some of the chemicals up so you have a feel for what they are.

the performance is quite good. The only flaw is that the narrator occasionally misreads Al as A capital i instead of A lowercase L and the same with Cl. I was able to follow it.

I first read this book as a college student and loved it, it's nice to be able to come back to it after a bit more than a decade.

Very technical but the performance is great!

Unless you’re a professional chemist the vast majority of what’s discussed will be way over your head, however it was a great history of propellants and the performance was very entertaining!

An audiobook only flawed by the unavoidable.

In audiobook format, it should many of the complaints - poor scanning and the like - that going the print book. it is read with spirit and clarity. Its only downfall is an artifact of the type of book and the audio format, that is, reading out chemical and mathematical formula.

highly entertaining, very informative

I always enjoy learning about them history of a topic, how something came to be, and this hits that squarely for me. Some of the specific compound names can make it difficult to follow if you're not familiar with chemistry, but even decades past my last chemistry course, it wasn't a problem.

A fascinating look into high end chemistry

One for the chemistry buff!!!

Makes me feel like I wasted my youth creating ridiculously expensive precious metal acids, when I could have been making rocket fuels, oh to bed few decades older.

A fascinating look at chemistry & chemical engineering back when not everything wasn't already known and people risked life & limb for their knowledge.

Bravo to the narrator, so many devilishly complicated chemical names delivered flawlessly, if he doesn't have a degree with a chemical background ....

OK, to be fair if you don't have a science or engineering degree this might be heavy going, but if you do it reminds you of the first time you blew things up.

Bravo!! Informative and entertaining to a techie

Utterly fascinating and simultaneously dry beyond belief. As a liaison engineer and technician, the admittedly necessary endless chemical formulations seem to drag on a bit. But the results are epic and worth every second. With explosions and reactions galore. I’ve dabbled in small, homemade liquid fueled rocket engines, so I have a cursory level of understanding. This book brought together many things I’ve wondered about.

I greatly appreciated the engineer’s humor sprinkled throughout the book. The narration was absolutely perfect too, making even the dry parts interesting!

I’d guess Elon Musk’s team studied this very book as a guide to their Raptor engine.

Neat piece of history.

Quite technical, but presented in a way that makes it a good listen for technical oriented types that aren't chemists.

Great writeup for the chemistry minded.

This book includes hilarious anecdotes and technical details. 5 stars! Recommend to anyone who enjoys aerospace and chemistry

hilarious and informative

a version of this book for solid fuels would be great h h j j