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Indeholder "In Re John D. Clark", "Preface", "1. How It Started", "2. Peenemunde and JPL", "3. The Hunting of the Hypergol . . .", "4. . . . and Its Mate", "5. Peroxide — Always a Bridesmaid", "6. Halogens and Politics and Deep Space", "7. Performance", "8. Lox and Flox and Cryogenics in
"In Re John D. Clark" af Isaac Asimov handler om at John D. Clark også skrev et par science-fiction noveller "Minus Planet" og "Space Blister" i 1937. Isaac Asimov var dybt imponeret, men John D. Clark var helt nede på jorden og flink og imødekommende, da de senere mødtes.
"Preface" er skrevet i 1971 af forfatteren selv og handler om at forskning i flydende raketbrændstof er ved at ebbe ud og det er med at få samlet historierne op inden folkene dør af alderdom. Som en af dem bemærker "What an opportunity to bring out repressed hostilities!" Fra 1 november 1949 til han gik på pension 2 januar 1970 har han været dybt involveret i forskningen, så han har meget at fortælle. Både til den interesserede lægmand og til efterfølgerne i feltet, som ellers risikerer at gøre noget, som man allerede ved er livsfarligt. Det var en lille skare måske 200, hvoraf højst 50 havde noget at sige. Masser af titler og fine eksamener og overraskende få fjolser.
"1. How It Started" handler om verden fra de første liter af flydende brint og ilt bliver produceret til militæret sætter sig tungt på forskningen fra midten af 1930'erne.
"2. Peenemunde and JPL" handler om anden verdenskrig og de parallelle spor udviklingen i USA og Tyskland tager.
"3. The Hunting of the Hypergol . . ." handler om hvordan man får styr på hypergolisk raketbrændstof, dvs noget der antænder af sig selv og helst meget hurtigt, når det møder et iltningsmiddel. Alle folk måler hypergolitet på hver sin måde og får forskellige resultater, men rangordningen er man normalt enige om. Luftvåbenet vil gerne have et standardbrændstof, JP-4, der er billigt og lettilgængeligt alle vegne, men det gør til gengæld at der ikke er to tønder af det, der er helt ens og det er rigtig skidt for et raketbrændstof. Vinderen viser sig at blive et kerosin-derivat UDMH. 17% UDMH og 83% JP-4 er et absolut hæderligt brændstof.
"4. . . . and Its Mate" handler om hvilke iltningsmidler, der er nogenlunde medgørlige i praksis. Rygende salpetersyre er på alle måder irriterende. Egenskaberne ændrer sig under lagring og det er besværligt at måle fx vandindholdet, som betyder voldsomt meget for hvordan det reagerer. Men man får tæmmet salpetersyre, så man får et glimrende iltningsmiddel, der ikke korroderer tanken og ikke ændrer karakter af at blive lagret i flere år. Omkring 1955 har man altså både standardbrændstoffer og standardiltningsmidler.
"5. Peroxide — Always a Bridesmaid" handler om brintoverilte, der i teorien er fin, men som dekomponerer under afgivelse af varme, som fremmer processen yderligere. Ingen er rigtigt varme på brintoverilte som iltningsmiddel, men som monopropellant er det en anden sag.
"6. Halogens and Politics and Deep Space" handler om ClF3 og dets krav til forsigtighed i omgangen med det.
"7. Performance" handler om hvordan man overhovedet måler hvor godt et brændstof virker.
"8. Lox and Flox and Cryogenics in General" handler om diverse drivmidler der skal køles meget ned før de fylder lidt nok til at kunne bruges.
"9. What Ivan Was Doing" handler om russernes tilsvarende forskning.
"10. "Exotics-" handler om diverse mærkelige substanser som man forsøger at fremstille for at se hvor gode de er som raketbrændstof.
"11. The Hopeful Monoprops" handler om den hellige gral, et stof der er sit eget iltningsmiddel. Problemet er at se forskel på den slags og livsfarlige sprængstoffer. De fleste af dem kan ret nemt tænde af hvis de udsættes for en chokbølge og er derfor ikke gode til at lave raketter af, der skal bruges militært. Man kan dog måske undgå det ved at blande dem i sidste øjeblik, men så skal man jo alligevel have to tanke og noget af ideen forsvinder.
"12. High Density and the Higher Foolishness" handler om at bruge fx kviksølv som tilsætningsstof. Og andre lignende morsomheder, som man ikke skal fyre af i sin baghave. Men man kan jo forsøge at lave en gel ud af sit brændstof, så det ikke skvulper rundt i tankene i ens rumskib.
"13. What Happens Next" handler om at der er styr på de praktisk anvendelige raketbrændstoffer i flydende form og at man skal være glad for ca 600 sekunder. Forudsigelserne holder stadig stik, såvidt jeg ved her i 2017. SpaceX bruger fx metan.
"Glossary" handler om de mange fagudtryk som RFNA = Red Fuming Nitric Acid, dvs rød rygende salpetersyre og WFNA = White Fuming Nitric Acid, dvs hvid rygende salpetersyre.
"Index" er et almindeligt opslagsregister på nær at nogle opslag som fx RFNA fylder ret meget.
Feltet "Flydende raketbrændstof" er meget ungt. Først i 1898 kunne man overhovedet lave flydende brint. I marts 1926 fløj den første raket med flydende brændstof. F. A. Tsander i Rusland, Robert H. Goddard i USA, Herman Oberth i Tyskland og Luigi Crocco i Italien eksperimenterede uden at kende til hinanden med mange af de samme ting. Goddard blandede iltningsmiddel og reaktionsmiddel i et sjovt ineffektivt forhold. Crocco brugte N2O4 som iltningsmiddel. Først efter mange fejlslagne forsøg fik man raketter til at opføre sig nogenlunde fredeligt og forudsigeligt. Fast brændstof nævnes også i bogen som noget, der er svært at få til at fungere ordentligt.
SpaceX Raptor motor kører med et brændkammertryk på 3900 psi, hvor forfatteren her på side 77 snakker om at man nok når 2500 om nogle år (bogen er skrevet i 1970'erne). Og den kører på methan og Lox.
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General", "9. What Ivan Was Doing", "10. "Exotics-", "11. The Hopeful Monoprops", "12. High Density and the Higher Foolishness", "13. What Happens Next", "Glossary", "Index"."In Re John D. Clark" af Isaac Asimov handler om at John D. Clark også skrev et par science-fiction noveller "Minus Planet" og "Space Blister" i 1937. Isaac Asimov var dybt imponeret, men John D. Clark var helt nede på jorden og flink og imødekommende, da de senere mødtes.
"Preface" er skrevet i 1971 af forfatteren selv og handler om at forskning i flydende raketbrændstof er ved at ebbe ud og det er med at få samlet historierne op inden folkene dør af alderdom. Som en af dem bemærker "What an opportunity to bring out repressed hostilities!" Fra 1 november 1949 til han gik på pension 2 januar 1970 har han været dybt involveret i forskningen, så han har meget at fortælle. Både til den interesserede lægmand og til efterfølgerne i feltet, som ellers risikerer at gøre noget, som man allerede ved er livsfarligt. Det var en lille skare måske 200, hvoraf højst 50 havde noget at sige. Masser af titler og fine eksamener og overraskende få fjolser.
"1. How It Started" handler om verden fra de første liter af flydende brint og ilt bliver produceret til militæret sætter sig tungt på forskningen fra midten af 1930'erne.
"2. Peenemunde and JPL" handler om anden verdenskrig og de parallelle spor udviklingen i USA og Tyskland tager.
"3. The Hunting of the Hypergol . . ." handler om hvordan man får styr på hypergolisk raketbrændstof, dvs noget der antænder af sig selv og helst meget hurtigt, når det møder et iltningsmiddel. Alle folk måler hypergolitet på hver sin måde og får forskellige resultater, men rangordningen er man normalt enige om. Luftvåbenet vil gerne have et standardbrændstof, JP-4, der er billigt og lettilgængeligt alle vegne, men det gør til gengæld at der ikke er to tønder af det, der er helt ens og det er rigtig skidt for et raketbrændstof. Vinderen viser sig at blive et kerosin-derivat UDMH. 17% UDMH og 83% JP-4 er et absolut hæderligt brændstof.
"4. . . . and Its Mate" handler om hvilke iltningsmidler, der er nogenlunde medgørlige i praksis. Rygende salpetersyre er på alle måder irriterende. Egenskaberne ændrer sig under lagring og det er besværligt at måle fx vandindholdet, som betyder voldsomt meget for hvordan det reagerer. Men man får tæmmet salpetersyre, så man får et glimrende iltningsmiddel, der ikke korroderer tanken og ikke ændrer karakter af at blive lagret i flere år. Omkring 1955 har man altså både standardbrændstoffer og standardiltningsmidler.
"5. Peroxide — Always a Bridesmaid" handler om brintoverilte, der i teorien er fin, men som dekomponerer under afgivelse af varme, som fremmer processen yderligere. Ingen er rigtigt varme på brintoverilte som iltningsmiddel, men som monopropellant er det en anden sag.
"6. Halogens and Politics and Deep Space" handler om ClF3 og dets krav til forsigtighed i omgangen med det.
"7. Performance" handler om hvordan man overhovedet måler hvor godt et brændstof virker.
"8. Lox and Flox and Cryogenics in General" handler om diverse drivmidler der skal køles meget ned før de fylder lidt nok til at kunne bruges.
"9. What Ivan Was Doing" handler om russernes tilsvarende forskning.
"10. "Exotics-" handler om diverse mærkelige substanser som man forsøger at fremstille for at se hvor gode de er som raketbrændstof.
"11. The Hopeful Monoprops" handler om den hellige gral, et stof der er sit eget iltningsmiddel. Problemet er at se forskel på den slags og livsfarlige sprængstoffer. De fleste af dem kan ret nemt tænde af hvis de udsættes for en chokbølge og er derfor ikke gode til at lave raketter af, der skal bruges militært. Man kan dog måske undgå det ved at blande dem i sidste øjeblik, men så skal man jo alligevel have to tanke og noget af ideen forsvinder.
"12. High Density and the Higher Foolishness" handler om at bruge fx kviksølv som tilsætningsstof. Og andre lignende morsomheder, som man ikke skal fyre af i sin baghave. Men man kan jo forsøge at lave en gel ud af sit brændstof, så det ikke skvulper rundt i tankene i ens rumskib.
"13. What Happens Next" handler om at der er styr på de praktisk anvendelige raketbrændstoffer i flydende form og at man skal være glad for ca 600 sekunder. Forudsigelserne holder stadig stik, såvidt jeg ved her i 2017. SpaceX bruger fx metan.
"Glossary" handler om de mange fagudtryk som RFNA = Red Fuming Nitric Acid, dvs rød rygende salpetersyre og WFNA = White Fuming Nitric Acid, dvs hvid rygende salpetersyre.
"Index" er et almindeligt opslagsregister på nær at nogle opslag som fx RFNA fylder ret meget.
Feltet "Flydende raketbrændstof" er meget ungt. Først i 1898 kunne man overhovedet lave flydende brint. I marts 1926 fløj den første raket med flydende brændstof. F. A. Tsander i Rusland, Robert H. Goddard i USA, Herman Oberth i Tyskland og Luigi Crocco i Italien eksperimenterede uden at kende til hinanden med mange af de samme ting. Goddard blandede iltningsmiddel og reaktionsmiddel i et sjovt ineffektivt forhold. Crocco brugte N2O4 som iltningsmiddel. Først efter mange fejlslagne forsøg fik man raketter til at opføre sig nogenlunde fredeligt og forudsigeligt. Fast brændstof nævnes også i bogen som noget, der er svært at få til at fungere ordentligt.
SpaceX Raptor motor kører med et brændkammertryk på 3900 psi, hvor forfatteren her på side 77 snakker om at man nok når 2500 om nogle år (bogen er skrevet i 1970'erne). Og den kører på methan og Lox.
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Genres
Publication
New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2017]
Description
This newly reissued debut book in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint 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, readers will want to get their hands on this influential classic, available for the first time in decades.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member AndreasJ
The book reportedly originated from Clark's wife telling him to write a book of his workplace stories, but it is really the history of the subtitle, not merely a memoir of Clark's own work in the field. I can't tell how accurate or fair he is, of course, but if there's any self-aggrandizement going
The story is told with style and a great deal of humour - especially regarding the many ways things can go horrendously wrong when working with liquids that are frequently poisonous, unstable, prone to spontaneous detonation, or all three.
Before becoming a rocket scientist, Clark published a couple sf stories, which Isaac Asimov praises highly in the foreword: I find myself tempted to track down a copy of "Minus Planet", apparently the first sf story to deal seriously with anti-matter.
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on its pretty subtle. Of course, as the leader of one of the major labs involved in propellant research in the '50s and '60s, he might well have felt as grand as he cared to be already.The story is told with style and a great deal of humour - especially regarding the many ways things can go horrendously wrong when working with liquids that are frequently poisonous, unstable, prone to spontaneous detonation, or all three.
Before becoming a rocket scientist, Clark published a couple sf stories, which Isaac Asimov praises highly in the foreword: I find myself tempted to track down a copy of "Minus Planet", apparently the first sf story to deal seriously with anti-matter.
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LibraryThing member dypaloh
Author John D. Clark’s ideal audience is propellant scientists and rocket engineers. They will appreciate his long experience and considerable technical savvy. If you’re not a propellant person, having had solid courses in chemistry will lessen the difficulties. The incantatory power of
One thing not especially discussed in detail is the question of value. Clark talks about how programs that had been set aside would be started again years later and still without useful result. What was necessary for these re-starts? New engineering developments elsewhere? Better fundamental chemical understanding developed in academia or industry or other arms efforts? One comes away thinking not necessarily, that re-funding a lapsed program sometimes just boiled down to lobbying skill.
Isaac Asimov contributes a fun introduction. A useful glossary and index are included.
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chemical names provides the narrative with an epic quality, almost as if the chemicals were characters in a saga and the chemists and engineers minor warring gods or spirits. Workers confront odors next to which the brimstone ones of Hades are as violets, and always looming near are surly phenomena capable of explosive complaints. I enjoyed Clark’s ever-present sense of humor. Any time the words “I had the bright idea . . . ” appear, you are about to be told how dangerously un-bright that idea proved. And his clear-eyed assessment of the computers of yore is perfect: “Everyone…has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.” Oh, I love that line.One thing not especially discussed in detail is the question of value. Clark talks about how programs that had been set aside would be started again years later and still without useful result. What was necessary for these re-starts? New engineering developments elsewhere? Better fundamental chemical understanding developed in academia or industry or other arms efforts? One comes away thinking not necessarily, that re-funding a lapsed program sometimes just boiled down to lobbying skill.
Isaac Asimov contributes a fun introduction. A useful glossary and index are included.
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LibraryThing member malexmave
Originally started reading the PDF version of this in April 2016, but since the PDF was suboptimal, I stopped reading it after a while. Then the new release came out, and I waited for three months (!) for my copy - yes, it was this popular.
What can I say. It's a pretty great book. If you are at all
What can I say. It's a pretty great book. If you are at all
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interested in rocket fuels or chemistry, I highly recommend it. While I don't have the faintest clue about chemistry, the anecdotes alone are worth reading the book for, and I can only imagine that chemists will get a lot more out of this book. Show Less
LibraryThing member encephalical
I didn't understand most of the chemistry, so the parts where Clark's rattling off various chemicals I didn't follow. Even so it was quite entertaining. The humor was a bit dated and cringy a few times.
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1972
Physical description
xvi, 195 p.; 20.3 cm
ISBN
9780813595832
Local notes
Omslag: Faceout Studio, Derek Thornton
Omslaget viser konstruktionstegninger for raketdyser og pumper og brændstoftanke
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
John Drury Clark, Ph.D. (August 15, 1907 - July 6, 1988)
Side v: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana
Side vii: This book is dedicated to my wife Inga, who heckled me into writing it with such wifely remarks as, "You talk a hell of a fine history. Now set yourself down in front of the typewriter - and write the damned thing!"
Side xii: Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity. There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
Side xiv: Brainstorms and bullbleep!
Side xv: The world was our oyster just waiting to be opened.
Side 1: The year was 1903, and before its end the Wright brothers' first airplane was to stagger briefly into the air. And in his city of St. Petersburg, in the realm of the Czar of All the Russias, a journal whose name can be translated as "Scientific Review" published an article which attracted no attention whatsoever from anybody. Its impressive but not very informative title was "Exploration of Space with Reactive Devices," and its author was one Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky, an obscure schoolteacher in the equally obscure town of Borovsk in Kaluga Province. The substance of the article can be summarized in five simple statements.
1. Space travel is possible.
2. This can be accomplished by means of, and only by means of, rocket propulsion, since a rocket is the only known propulsive device which will work in empty space.
3. Gunpowder rockets cannot be used, since gunpowder (or smokeless powder either, for that matter) simply does not have enough energy to do the job.
4. Certain liquids do possess the necessary energy.
5. Liquid hydrogen would be a good fuel and liquid oxygen a good oxidizer, and the pair would make a nearly ideal propellant combination.
Side 2: Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen were new things in the world.
Side 4: An Italian father is comparable to a Jewish mother.
Side 6: Esnault Pelterie tried to use tetranitromethane, C(N02)4 for his oxidizer, and promptly blew off four fingers. (This event was to prove typical of TNM work.)
Side 6: Unfortunately, in his calculations he somewhat naively assumed 100 percent thermal efficiency, which would involve either (a) an infinite chamber pressure, or (b) a zero exhaust pressure firing into a perfect vacuum, and in either case would require an infinitely long nozzle, which might involve some difficulties in fabrication. (Thermal efficiencies in a rocket usually run around 50 or 60 percent.)
Side 7: A monopropellant is a liquid which contains in itself both the fuel and the oxidizer, either as a single molecule such as methyl nitrate, CH3NO3 in which the oxygens can burn the carbon and the hydrogens, or as a mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer, such as a solution of benzene in N2O4 . On paper, the idea looks attractive. You have only one fluid to inject into the chamber, which simplifies your plumbing, your mixture ratio is built in and stays where you want it, you don't have to worry about building an injector which will mix the fuel and the oxidizer properly, and things are simpler all around.
Side 7: Any intimate mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer is a potential explosive, and a molecule with one reducing (fuel) end and one oxidizing end, separated by a pair of firmly crossed fingers, is an invitation to disaster.
Side 7: It exploded and put him in the hospital. Dead end.
Side 7: Helmuth Walter, at the Chemical State Institute in Berlin, in 1934 and 1935 developed a monopropellant motor which fired 80 percent hydrogen peroxide, which had only lately become available. When suitably catalyzed, or when heated, hydrogen peroxide decomposes into oxygen and superheated steam, and thus can be used as a monopropellant. This work was not made public - the Luftwaffe could see uses for it - but it was continued and led to many things in the next few years.
Side 8: The benign eye of Theodore von Kármán watched over the whole.
Side 10: "If the British ever bomb Berlin, you can call me Meyer!" -- Hermann Goering
Side 11: Obviously, if your combination is hypergolic, you can throw out all the ignition schemes and devices, and let the chemistry do the work. The whole business is much simpler and more reliable. But as usual, there's a catch. If your propellants flow into the chamber and ignite immediately, you're in business. But if they flow in, collect in a puddle, and then ignite, you have an explosion which generally demolishes the engine and its immediate surroundings. The accepted euphemism for this sequence of events is a "hard start." Thus, a hypergolic combustion must be very fast, or it is worse than useless. The Germans set an upper limit of 50 milliseconds on the ignition delay that they could tolerate.
Side 11: Zborowski named his propellants after plants. Nitric acid he called "Salbei" for sage, and his fuels "Tonka," after the bean from which coumarin, which smells like vanilla, is extracted. Considering the odors of the things he worked with, I can't think of more inappropriate names!
Side 14: The slurry idea was to emerge again twenty years later, to drive another generation of experimenters crazy.
Side 14: The only result of these experiments was a depressing series of explosions and demolished motors. And at Peenemunde, a Dr. Wahrmke tried dissolving alcohol in 80 percent H2O2 and then firing that in a motor. It detonated, and killed him.
Side 15: Peroxide or nitrous oxide, N2O, was injected into a motor in which several sticks of porous carbon were secured. Nitrous oxide can decompose exothermically into oxygen and nitrogen, as peroxide does to oxygen and steam, and can thus act as a monopropellant, but the experimenters wanted to get extra energy from the combustion of the carbon by the oxygen formed. When they surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war, they assured their captors that just a little more engineering work was needed to make the system work properly. Actually some twenty years elapsed before anybody could make a hybrid work.
Side 15: It is difficult to say why, but the extremely poisonous nature of the beast may have had something to do with its rejection.
Side 16: Malina and company started experimental work with RFNA and gasoline as early as 1941 - and immediately ran into trouble. This is an extraordinarily recalcitrant combination, beautifully designed to drive any experimenter out of his mind. In the first place, it's almost impossible to get it started. JPL was using a spark plug for ignition, and more often than not, getting an explosion rather than the smooth start that they were looking for. And when they did get it going, the motor would cough, chug, scream and hiccup - and then usually blow anyway. Metallic sodium suspended in the fuel helped the ignition somewhat, and benzene was a little better than gasoline - but not much, or enough.
Side 20: The Americans thought they knew all about it - as had the Germans. Unwarranted euphoria and misplaced confidence are international phenomena.
Side 21: Fluorine might be good, but its density is too low, and it's a holy terror to handle.
Side 22: The acid was so corrosive to anything you wanted to make propellant tanks out of that it had to be loaded into the missile just before firing, which meant handling it in the field. And when poured it gives off dense clouds of highly poisonous NO2, and the liquid itself produces dangerous and extremely painful burns when it touches the human hide.
Side 22: The aniline is almost as bad, but a bit more subtle in its actions. If a man is spashed generously with it, and it isn't removed immediately, he usually turns purple and then blue and is likely to die of cyanosis in a matter of minutes. So the combination was understandably unpopular, and the call went out for a new one that was, at least, not quite so poisonous and miserable to handle.
Side 23: Furfuryl alcohol was no good with mixed acid. The combination was smoky and messy, and the reaction of the sulfuric acid of the MA with the alcohol produced a weird collection of tars, cokes, and resins, which quite clogged up the motor.
Side 23: The Edisonian approach has much to recommend it, but can be run into the ground. One of the oddest combinations to be investigated was tried by RMI, who burned d-limonene with WFNA. d-limonene is a terpene which can be extracted from the skins of citrus fruits, and all during the runs the test area was blanketed with a delightful odor of lemon oil. The contrast with the odors of most other rocket propellants makes the event worth recording.
Side 24: What information he thought they would provide escaped me at the time, and still does.
Side 26: It had two virtues, or maybe three. It was hypergolic with mixed acid, and it had a rather high density for a fuel. And it wasn't corrosive. But its performance was below that of a straight hydrocarbon, and its odor - ! Well, its odor was something to consider. Intense, pervasive and penetrating, and resembling the stink of an enraged skunk, but surpassing, by far, the best efforts of the most vigorous specimen of Mephitis mephitis. It also clings to the clothes and the skin.
Side 27: The odor of these was not so much skunk-like as garlicky, the epitome and concentrate of all the back doors of all the bad Greek restaurants in all the world.
Side 27: Finally he surpassed himself with something that had a dimethylamino group attached to a mercaptan sulfur, and whose odor can't, with all the resources of the English language, even be described. It also drew flies.
Side 32: The great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy but extrapolation. -- E. T. Bell
Side 42: An alternative to RFNA was mixed acid, essentially WFNA to which had been added some 10 to 17 percent of H2SO4. Its performance was somewhat lower than that of RFNA (all that stable sulfuric acid and that heavy sulfur atom didn't help any) but its density was a little better than that of the other acid, and it was magnificently hypergolic with many fuels. (I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100 cc of mixed acid - and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm a moment, and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the candidate's demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a propellant chemist.)
Side 48: Every conceivable source of error was investigated — and it was surprising to learn in how many ways a classical acid-base titration can go wrong. Nobody would have believed, until he learned the hard way, that when you make up five gallons of 1.4 normal NaOH, you have to stir the solution for an hour to make sure that its concentration is uniform to within one part in 10,000 throughout the whole volume.
Side 48: Nor that when air is admitted to the stock bottle it has to be bubbled through a trap of the same solution. If it isn't, the moisture in the laboratory air will dilute the upper layer of the NaOH and foul you up. Nor that when you get to a phenolphthalein end-point with your 1.4 N alkali, it's advisable to back-titrate with 0.1 N HCl (thus splitting the last drop) until the pink color is the faintest discernible tint. But all those precautions and refinements are necessary if you need results that you can believe.
Side 49: The nitric acid was destroyed by reacting it with warm formic acid, and what was left was titrated, potentiometrically, with sodium acetate in acetic acid, in a medium of glacial acetic acid. One electrode was a conventional glass electrode as used for pH determination, the other a modified calomel electrode, using saturated lithium chloride in acetic acid. Again, a peculiar but effective analysis. And as soon as these methods had been worked out, everybody stopped using either mixed acid!
Side 51: Der mangler tegn nogle steder på denne side, fx "If is the active oxidizing ion" skal nok være "If #2 is the active oxidizing ion".
Side 52: I have actually seen the hair-raising sight of rocket mechanics trying to determine the oxygen pressure developed over decomposing WFNA by measuring the bulging of the drums - and shuddered at the sight! The equilibrium oxygen pressure over 100 percent acid at zero ullage (no appreciable unfilled volume in the tank) at 160 degrees F turned out to be well over 70 atmospheres. Nobody wants to work with a bomb like that.
Side 59: Say that you have a tank of peroxide, with no efficient means of sucking heat out of it. Your peroxide starts to decompose for some reason or other. This decomposition produces heat, which warms up the rest of the peroxide, which naturally then starts to decompose faster - producing more heat. And so the faster it goes the faster it goes until the whole thing goes up in a magnificent whoosh or bang as the case may be, spreading superheated steam and hot oxygen all over the landscape.
Side 60: A disconcerting number of things could start the decomposition in the first place: most of the transition metals (Fe, Cu, Ag, Co, etc.) and their compounds; many organic compounds (a splash of peroxide on a wool suit can turn the wearer into a flaming torch, suitable for decorating Nero's gardens); ordinary dirt, of ambiguous composition, and universal provenance; OH ions. Name a substance at random, and there's a 50-50 chance (or better) that it will catalyze peroxide decomposition.
Side 62: Most of the Navy work on peroxide was not directed toward missiles, but toward what was called "super performance" for fighter planes - an auxiliary rocket propulsion unit that could be brought into play to produce a burst of very high speed - so that when a pilot found six Migs breathing down his neck he could hit the panic button and perform the maneuver known as getting the hell out of here.
Side 63: Carrier admirals are - with good reason - deadly afraid of fire. That was one of the things they had against acid and a hypergolic fuel.
Side 63: The Lord had his hands on our heads that day - the firemen, a couple of dozen bystanders, and me. For when we - and other people - tried it again (fortunately on a smaller scale) the results were different. The jet fuel burns quietly at first, then the flare burning starts coming, and its frequency increases. (That's the time to start running.) Then, as the layer of JP gets thinner, the peroxide underneath gets warmer, and starts to boil and decompose, and the overlying fuel is permeated with oxygen and peroxide vapor. And then the whole shebang detonates, with absolutely shattering violence.
Side 65: Fluorine nitrate and perchlorate, FNO3 and FClO4, were well known, but both were sensitive and treacherous explosives. Of the latter it had been reported that it frequently detonated "upon heating or cooling; freezing or melting; evaporation or condensation; and sometimes for no apparent reason."
Side 66: All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. 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.
Side 67: It happened at their Shreveport, Louisiana, installation, while they were preparing to ship out, for the first time, a one-ton steel cylinder of CTF. The cylinder had been cooled with dry ice to make it easier to load the material into it, and the cold had apparently embrittled the steel. For as they were maneuvering the cylinder onto a dolly, it split and dumped one ton of chlorine trifluoride onto the floor. It chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a threefoot hole in the gravel underneath, filled the place with fumes which corroded everything in sight, and, in general, made one hell of a mess.
Side 67: Civil Defense turned out, and started to evacuate the neighborhood, and to put it mildly, there was quite a brouhaha before things quieted down. Miraculously, nobody was killed, but there was one casualty - the man who had been steadying the cylinder when it split. He was found some five hundred feet away, where he had reached Mach 2 and was still picking up speed when he was stopped by a heart attack.
Side 67: This episode was still in the future when the rocket people started working with CTF, but they nevertheless knew enough to be scared to death, and proceeded with a degree of caution appropriate to dental work on a king cobra. And they never had any reason to regret that caution. The stuff consistently lived up to its reputation.
Side 69: As may be imagined, the test is somewhat noisy, and best done some distance from human habitation, or, at least, from humans who can make their complaints stick.
Side 70: The mixture turned out to be somewhat corrosive to stainless steel at 71° (hydrazine perchlorate in hydrazine is a strong acid) but its behavior when it was spilled was what scared the engineers. If it caught fire as it lay on the ground, it would burn quietly for some time, and then; as the hydrazine perchlorate became more concentrated, it would detonate - violently. (Hydrazoid N, or any similar mixture, it turned out, would do the same thing.)
Side 71: Cl2O7, with an endothermic heat of formation of +63.4 kcal/mole, was one of the most powerful liquid oxidizers known in the early 50's, and preliminary calculations showed that it should give a remarkably high performance with any number of fuels. It had, however, one slight drawback - it would detonate violently at the slightest provocation or none at all.
Side 72: One of his other exploits was the development of a fearsome cutting torch burning powdered aluminum with gaseous fluorine. He could slice through a concrete block with it, to the accompaniment of an horrendous display of sparks, flames, and fumes which suggested an inadequately controlled catastrophe.
Side 74: This sort of thing was happening all the time, as organic chemists tried to name inorganic compounds, and inorganic chemists made a mess of naming organics!
Side 75: NF 3 is a rather inert material, and its chemistry isn't too complicated, but N 2 F 4 turned out to be a horse of another color, with a peculiarly rich and interesting chemistry. The propellant men were not exactly overjoyed by this development, since they much prefer to deal with an unenterprising propellant, which just sits in its tank, doing nothing, until they get around to burning it.
Side 77: The firstis (typo for first is)
Side 77: Rocket motors designed to operate only in deep space are generally designed to have a comparatively low chamber pressure - 150 psia or less - and it takes less energy to inject the propellants than would be the case with motors designed for sea-level use, whose chamber pressure is usually around 1000 psia. (In a few years it will probably be 2500!)
Side 79: In the old Royal Spanish Army there was a decoration awarded to a general who won a battle fought against orders. Of course, if he lost it, he was shot.
Side 80: Dr. Sam Hashman and Joe Smith, of my own group, hunted for it for more than three years, without any luck, although they employed every known synthetic technique short of sacrificing a virgin to the moon. (A critical shortage of raw material held that one up.)
Side 97: Each of the six 200,000 pound hydrogen motors in Saturn V, five in the second stage, one in the third, burns 80 pounds of hydrogen per second.
Side 102: The interest has endured to the present. In the face of considerable disillusionment.
Side 102: For it has its drawbacks. The least of these is that it's at least as toxic as fluorine. (People who speak of the invigorating odor of ozone have never met a real concentration of it!) Much more important is the fact that it's unstable - murderously so. At the slightest provocation and sometimes for no apparent reason, it may revert explosively to oxygen. And this reversion is catalyzed by water, chlorine, metal oxides, alkalis - and by, apparently, certain substances which have not been identified. Compared to ozone, hydrogen peroxide has the sensitivity of a heavyweight wrestler.
Side 113: When you have a turbine spinning at some 4000 rpm, and the clearance between the blades is a few thousandths of an inch, and this sticky, viscous liquid deposits on the blades, the engine is likely to undergo what the British, with precision, call "catastrophic self-disassembly."
Side 116: Incidentally, a lot of the work with hazardous propellants has been done at Edwards. It's located in the middle of the Mojave desert, and you don't have to worry about the neighbors. Even if you spill a ton of liquid fluorine - and that's been done there, just to see what would happen - the only thing that's likely to be damaged is the peace of mind of a few jack rabbits and rattlesnakes.
Side 121: You can throw it around, kick it, put bullets through it, and nothing happens. But if there is a tiny bubble of gas in it, and that bubble is compressed rapidly - possibly by a water-hammer effect when a valve is closed suddenly - it will detonate - violently. This is known as "sensitivity to adiabatic compression," and in this respect it is at least as touchy as nitroglycerine.
Side 122: It is also likely to polymerize in storage, forming gummy polyethylene ethers, which plug up everything.
Side 125: it's not the easiest substance in the world to handle.
Side 127: It sprayed into the chamber, collected in a puddle in the bottom, and then reacted with the wire. The nozzle couldn't cope with all the gas produced, the chamber pressure rose exponentially, and the reaction changed to a high order detonation which demolished the motor, propagated through the fuel line to the propellant tank, detonated the propellant there (fortunately there were only a few pounds in the tank) and wrecked just about everything in the test cell.
Side 134: How he avoided suicide (the first rule in handling liquid oxygen is that you never, never let it come in contact with a potential fuel) is an interesting question, particularly as JPL later demonstrated that you could make the mixture detonate merely by shining a bright light on it.
Side 135: it is incomparably more explosive than any other known substance
Side 135: the explosions of the perchlorate esters are louder and more destructive than those of any other substance; it was necessary to work with minimum quantities under the protection of thick gloves, iron masks [Ha, there, M. Dumas!], and thick glasses, and to handle the vessels with long holders
Side 135: He told me later that the esters were easy enough to synthesize, but that he and his crew had never been able to fire them in a motor, since they invariably detonated before they could be poured into the propellant tank. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that this line of investigation was not further extended.
Side 136: They blew up their setup, which goes to show that it isn't a good idea to try to develop a new type of motor with an experimental propellant. One unknown at a time is plenty to worry about!
Side 148: We were good friends, but it wasn't often that I had a chance to do him in the eye, and it was too good an opportunity to miss.
Side 149: Putting a final report together was sometimes something of a Donnybrook. The committee, as might be imagined, was composed of highly self-confident and howlingly articulate individualists, and there were always at least six of us present each of whom considered himself a master of English prose style. Whew!
Side 149: A test that took a lot longer to decide on was the "Drop-Weight." For years, people in the explosive business had been dropping weights on samples of their wares, and rating their sensitivity on the basis of how far you had to drop how big a weight in order to make the sample go off. We looked into the matter and discovered, to our dismay, that the JPL tester disagreed with the Picatinny tester, which disagreed with the Hercules apparatus, whose results could not be compared with those of the Bureau of American Railroads, which, in turn, contradicted those of the Bureau of Mines. Furthermore, none of them was any good at all with liquids.
Side 151: Well, through a combination of this and that, the motor blew on startup. We never discovered whether or not the traps worked - we couldn't find enough fragments to find out. The fragments from the injector just short-circuited the traps, smashed into the tank, and set off the 200 pounds of propellant in that. (Each pound of propellant had more available energy than two pounds of TNT.) I never saw such a mess. The walls of the test cell - two feet of concrete - went out, and the roof came in. The motor itself - a heavy, workhorse job of solid copper - went about 600 feet down range. And a six-foot square of armor plate sailed into the woods, cutting off a few trees at the root, smashing a granite boulder, bouncing into the air and slicing off a few treetops, and finally coming to rest some 1400 feet from where it started. The woods looked as though a stampeding herd of wild elephants had been through.
Omslaget viser konstruktionstegninger for raketdyser og pumper og brændstoftanke
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
John Drury Clark, Ph.D. (August 15, 1907 - July 6, 1988)
Side v: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana
Side vii: This book is dedicated to my wife Inga, who heckled me into writing it with such wifely remarks as, "You talk a hell of a fine history. Now set yourself down in front of the typewriter - and write the damned thing!"
Side xii: Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity. There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
Side xiv: Brainstorms and bullbleep!
Side xv: The world was our oyster just waiting to be opened.
Side 1: The year was 1903, and before its end the Wright brothers' first airplane was to stagger briefly into the air. And in his city of St. Petersburg, in the realm of the Czar of All the Russias, a journal whose name can be translated as "Scientific Review" published an article which attracted no attention whatsoever from anybody. Its impressive but not very informative title was "Exploration of Space with Reactive Devices," and its author was one Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky, an obscure schoolteacher in the equally obscure town of Borovsk in Kaluga Province. The substance of the article can be summarized in five simple statements.
1. Space travel is possible.
2. This can be accomplished by means of, and only by means of, rocket propulsion, since a rocket is the only known propulsive device which will work in empty space.
3. Gunpowder rockets cannot be used, since gunpowder (or smokeless powder either, for that matter) simply does not have enough energy to do the job.
4. Certain liquids do possess the necessary energy.
5. Liquid hydrogen would be a good fuel and liquid oxygen a good oxidizer, and the pair would make a nearly ideal propellant combination.
Side 2: Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen were new things in the world.
Side 4: An Italian father is comparable to a Jewish mother.
Side 6: Esnault Pelterie tried to use tetranitromethane, C(N02)4 for his oxidizer, and promptly blew off four fingers. (This event was to prove typical of TNM work.)
Side 6: Unfortunately, in his calculations he somewhat naively assumed 100 percent thermal efficiency, which would involve either (a) an infinite chamber pressure, or (b) a zero exhaust pressure firing into a perfect vacuum, and in either case would require an infinitely long nozzle, which might involve some difficulties in fabrication. (Thermal efficiencies in a rocket usually run around 50 or 60 percent.)
Side 7: A monopropellant is a liquid which contains in itself both the fuel and the oxidizer, either as a single molecule such as methyl nitrate, CH3NO3 in which the oxygens can burn the carbon and the hydrogens, or as a mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer, such as a solution of benzene in N2O4 . On paper, the idea looks attractive. You have only one fluid to inject into the chamber, which simplifies your plumbing, your mixture ratio is built in and stays where you want it, you don't have to worry about building an injector which will mix the fuel and the oxidizer properly, and things are simpler all around.
Side 7: Any intimate mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer is a potential explosive, and a molecule with one reducing (fuel) end and one oxidizing end, separated by a pair of firmly crossed fingers, is an invitation to disaster.
Side 7: It exploded and put him in the hospital. Dead end.
Side 7: Helmuth Walter, at the Chemical State Institute in Berlin, in 1934 and 1935 developed a monopropellant motor which fired 80 percent hydrogen peroxide, which had only lately become available. When suitably catalyzed, or when heated, hydrogen peroxide decomposes into oxygen and superheated steam, and thus can be used as a monopropellant. This work was not made public - the Luftwaffe could see uses for it - but it was continued and led to many things in the next few years.
Side 8: The benign eye of Theodore von Kármán watched over the whole.
Side 10: "If the British ever bomb Berlin, you can call me Meyer!" -- Hermann Goering
Side 11: Obviously, if your combination is hypergolic, you can throw out all the ignition schemes and devices, and let the chemistry do the work. The whole business is much simpler and more reliable. But as usual, there's a catch. If your propellants flow into the chamber and ignite immediately, you're in business. But if they flow in, collect in a puddle, and then ignite, you have an explosion which generally demolishes the engine and its immediate surroundings. The accepted euphemism for this sequence of events is a "hard start." Thus, a hypergolic combustion must be very fast, or it is worse than useless. The Germans set an upper limit of 50 milliseconds on the ignition delay that they could tolerate.
Side 11: Zborowski named his propellants after plants. Nitric acid he called "Salbei" for sage, and his fuels "Tonka," after the bean from which coumarin, which smells like vanilla, is extracted. Considering the odors of the things he worked with, I can't think of more inappropriate names!
Side 14: The slurry idea was to emerge again twenty years later, to drive another generation of experimenters crazy.
Side 14: The only result of these experiments was a depressing series of explosions and demolished motors. And at Peenemunde, a Dr. Wahrmke tried dissolving alcohol in 80 percent H2O2 and then firing that in a motor. It detonated, and killed him.
Side 15: Peroxide or nitrous oxide, N2O, was injected into a motor in which several sticks of porous carbon were secured. Nitrous oxide can decompose exothermically into oxygen and nitrogen, as peroxide does to oxygen and steam, and can thus act as a monopropellant, but the experimenters wanted to get extra energy from the combustion of the carbon by the oxygen formed. When they surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war, they assured their captors that just a little more engineering work was needed to make the system work properly. Actually some twenty years elapsed before anybody could make a hybrid work.
Side 15: It is difficult to say why, but the extremely poisonous nature of the beast may have had something to do with its rejection.
Side 16: Malina and company started experimental work with RFNA and gasoline as early as 1941 - and immediately ran into trouble. This is an extraordinarily recalcitrant combination, beautifully designed to drive any experimenter out of his mind. In the first place, it's almost impossible to get it started. JPL was using a spark plug for ignition, and more often than not, getting an explosion rather than the smooth start that they were looking for. And when they did get it going, the motor would cough, chug, scream and hiccup - and then usually blow anyway. Metallic sodium suspended in the fuel helped the ignition somewhat, and benzene was a little better than gasoline - but not much, or enough.
Side 20: The Americans thought they knew all about it - as had the Germans. Unwarranted euphoria and misplaced confidence are international phenomena.
Side 21: Fluorine might be good, but its density is too low, and it's a holy terror to handle.
Side 22: The acid was so corrosive to anything you wanted to make propellant tanks out of that it had to be loaded into the missile just before firing, which meant handling it in the field. And when poured it gives off dense clouds of highly poisonous NO2, and the liquid itself produces dangerous and extremely painful burns when it touches the human hide.
Side 22: The aniline is almost as bad, but a bit more subtle in its actions. If a man is spashed generously with it, and it isn't removed immediately, he usually turns purple and then blue and is likely to die of cyanosis in a matter of minutes. So the combination was understandably unpopular, and the call went out for a new one that was, at least, not quite so poisonous and miserable to handle.
Side 23: Furfuryl alcohol was no good with mixed acid. The combination was smoky and messy, and the reaction of the sulfuric acid of the MA with the alcohol produced a weird collection of tars, cokes, and resins, which quite clogged up the motor.
Side 23: The Edisonian approach has much to recommend it, but can be run into the ground. One of the oddest combinations to be investigated was tried by RMI, who burned d-limonene with WFNA. d-limonene is a terpene which can be extracted from the skins of citrus fruits, and all during the runs the test area was blanketed with a delightful odor of lemon oil. The contrast with the odors of most other rocket propellants makes the event worth recording.
Side 24: What information he thought they would provide escaped me at the time, and still does.
Side 26: It had two virtues, or maybe three. It was hypergolic with mixed acid, and it had a rather high density for a fuel. And it wasn't corrosive. But its performance was below that of a straight hydrocarbon, and its odor - ! Well, its odor was something to consider. Intense, pervasive and penetrating, and resembling the stink of an enraged skunk, but surpassing, by far, the best efforts of the most vigorous specimen of Mephitis mephitis. It also clings to the clothes and the skin.
Side 27: The odor of these was not so much skunk-like as garlicky, the epitome and concentrate of all the back doors of all the bad Greek restaurants in all the world.
Side 27: Finally he surpassed himself with something that had a dimethylamino group attached to a mercaptan sulfur, and whose odor can't, with all the resources of the English language, even be described. It also drew flies.
Side 32: The great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy but extrapolation. -- E. T. Bell
Side 42: An alternative to RFNA was mixed acid, essentially WFNA to which had been added some 10 to 17 percent of H2SO4. Its performance was somewhat lower than that of RFNA (all that stable sulfuric acid and that heavy sulfur atom didn't help any) but its density was a little better than that of the other acid, and it was magnificently hypergolic with many fuels. (I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100 cc of mixed acid - and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm a moment, and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the candidate's demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a propellant chemist.)
Side 48: Every conceivable source of error was investigated — and it was surprising to learn in how many ways a classical acid-base titration can go wrong. Nobody would have believed, until he learned the hard way, that when you make up five gallons of 1.4 normal NaOH, you have to stir the solution for an hour to make sure that its concentration is uniform to within one part in 10,000 throughout the whole volume.
Side 48: Nor that when air is admitted to the stock bottle it has to be bubbled through a trap of the same solution. If it isn't, the moisture in the laboratory air will dilute the upper layer of the NaOH and foul you up. Nor that when you get to a phenolphthalein end-point with your 1.4 N alkali, it's advisable to back-titrate with 0.1 N HCl (thus splitting the last drop) until the pink color is the faintest discernible tint. But all those precautions and refinements are necessary if you need results that you can believe.
Side 49: The nitric acid was destroyed by reacting it with warm formic acid, and what was left was titrated, potentiometrically, with sodium acetate in acetic acid, in a medium of glacial acetic acid. One electrode was a conventional glass electrode as used for pH determination, the other a modified calomel electrode, using saturated lithium chloride in acetic acid. Again, a peculiar but effective analysis. And as soon as these methods had been worked out, everybody stopped using either mixed acid!
Side 51: Der mangler tegn nogle steder på denne side, fx "If is the active oxidizing ion" skal nok være "If #2 is the active oxidizing ion".
Side 52: I have actually seen the hair-raising sight of rocket mechanics trying to determine the oxygen pressure developed over decomposing WFNA by measuring the bulging of the drums - and shuddered at the sight! The equilibrium oxygen pressure over 100 percent acid at zero ullage (no appreciable unfilled volume in the tank) at 160 degrees F turned out to be well over 70 atmospheres. Nobody wants to work with a bomb like that.
Side 59: Say that you have a tank of peroxide, with no efficient means of sucking heat out of it. Your peroxide starts to decompose for some reason or other. This decomposition produces heat, which warms up the rest of the peroxide, which naturally then starts to decompose faster - producing more heat. And so the faster it goes the faster it goes until the whole thing goes up in a magnificent whoosh or bang as the case may be, spreading superheated steam and hot oxygen all over the landscape.
Side 60: A disconcerting number of things could start the decomposition in the first place: most of the transition metals (Fe, Cu, Ag, Co, etc.) and their compounds; many organic compounds (a splash of peroxide on a wool suit can turn the wearer into a flaming torch, suitable for decorating Nero's gardens); ordinary dirt, of ambiguous composition, and universal provenance; OH ions. Name a substance at random, and there's a 50-50 chance (or better) that it will catalyze peroxide decomposition.
Side 62: Most of the Navy work on peroxide was not directed toward missiles, but toward what was called "super performance" for fighter planes - an auxiliary rocket propulsion unit that could be brought into play to produce a burst of very high speed - so that when a pilot found six Migs breathing down his neck he could hit the panic button and perform the maneuver known as getting the hell out of here.
Side 63: Carrier admirals are - with good reason - deadly afraid of fire. That was one of the things they had against acid and a hypergolic fuel.
Side 63: The Lord had his hands on our heads that day - the firemen, a couple of dozen bystanders, and me. For when we - and other people - tried it again (fortunately on a smaller scale) the results were different. The jet fuel burns quietly at first, then the flare burning starts coming, and its frequency increases. (That's the time to start running.) Then, as the layer of JP gets thinner, the peroxide underneath gets warmer, and starts to boil and decompose, and the overlying fuel is permeated with oxygen and peroxide vapor. And then the whole shebang detonates, with absolutely shattering violence.
Side 65: Fluorine nitrate and perchlorate, FNO3 and FClO4, were well known, but both were sensitive and treacherous explosives. Of the latter it had been reported that it frequently detonated "upon heating or cooling; freezing or melting; evaporation or condensation; and sometimes for no apparent reason."
Side 66: All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. 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.
Side 67: It happened at their Shreveport, Louisiana, installation, while they were preparing to ship out, for the first time, a one-ton steel cylinder of CTF. The cylinder had been cooled with dry ice to make it easier to load the material into it, and the cold had apparently embrittled the steel. For as they were maneuvering the cylinder onto a dolly, it split and dumped one ton of chlorine trifluoride onto the floor. It chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a threefoot hole in the gravel underneath, filled the place with fumes which corroded everything in sight, and, in general, made one hell of a mess.
Side 67: Civil Defense turned out, and started to evacuate the neighborhood, and to put it mildly, there was quite a brouhaha before things quieted down. Miraculously, nobody was killed, but there was one casualty - the man who had been steadying the cylinder when it split. He was found some five hundred feet away, where he had reached Mach 2 and was still picking up speed when he was stopped by a heart attack.
Side 67: This episode was still in the future when the rocket people started working with CTF, but they nevertheless knew enough to be scared to death, and proceeded with a degree of caution appropriate to dental work on a king cobra. And they never had any reason to regret that caution. The stuff consistently lived up to its reputation.
Side 69: As may be imagined, the test is somewhat noisy, and best done some distance from human habitation, or, at least, from humans who can make their complaints stick.
Side 70: The mixture turned out to be somewhat corrosive to stainless steel at 71° (hydrazine perchlorate in hydrazine is a strong acid) but its behavior when it was spilled was what scared the engineers. If it caught fire as it lay on the ground, it would burn quietly for some time, and then; as the hydrazine perchlorate became more concentrated, it would detonate - violently. (Hydrazoid N, or any similar mixture, it turned out, would do the same thing.)
Side 71: Cl2O7, with an endothermic heat of formation of +63.4 kcal/mole, was one of the most powerful liquid oxidizers known in the early 50's, and preliminary calculations showed that it should give a remarkably high performance with any number of fuels. It had, however, one slight drawback - it would detonate violently at the slightest provocation or none at all.
Side 72: One of his other exploits was the development of a fearsome cutting torch burning powdered aluminum with gaseous fluorine. He could slice through a concrete block with it, to the accompaniment of an horrendous display of sparks, flames, and fumes which suggested an inadequately controlled catastrophe.
Side 74: This sort of thing was happening all the time, as organic chemists tried to name inorganic compounds, and inorganic chemists made a mess of naming organics!
Side 75: NF 3 is a rather inert material, and its chemistry isn't too complicated, but N 2 F 4 turned out to be a horse of another color, with a peculiarly rich and interesting chemistry. The propellant men were not exactly overjoyed by this development, since they much prefer to deal with an unenterprising propellant, which just sits in its tank, doing nothing, until they get around to burning it.
Side 77: The firstis (typo for first is)
Side 77: Rocket motors designed to operate only in deep space are generally designed to have a comparatively low chamber pressure - 150 psia or less - and it takes less energy to inject the propellants than would be the case with motors designed for sea-level use, whose chamber pressure is usually around 1000 psia. (In a few years it will probably be 2500!)
Side 79: In the old Royal Spanish Army there was a decoration awarded to a general who won a battle fought against orders. Of course, if he lost it, he was shot.
Side 80: Dr. Sam Hashman and Joe Smith, of my own group, hunted for it for more than three years, without any luck, although they employed every known synthetic technique short of sacrificing a virgin to the moon. (A critical shortage of raw material held that one up.)
Side 97: Each of the six 200,000 pound hydrogen motors in Saturn V, five in the second stage, one in the third, burns 80 pounds of hydrogen per second.
Side 102: The interest has endured to the present. In the face of considerable disillusionment.
Side 102: For it has its drawbacks. The least of these is that it's at least as toxic as fluorine. (People who speak of the invigorating odor of ozone have never met a real concentration of it!) Much more important is the fact that it's unstable - murderously so. At the slightest provocation and sometimes for no apparent reason, it may revert explosively to oxygen. And this reversion is catalyzed by water, chlorine, metal oxides, alkalis - and by, apparently, certain substances which have not been identified. Compared to ozone, hydrogen peroxide has the sensitivity of a heavyweight wrestler.
Side 113: When you have a turbine spinning at some 4000 rpm, and the clearance between the blades is a few thousandths of an inch, and this sticky, viscous liquid deposits on the blades, the engine is likely to undergo what the British, with precision, call "catastrophic self-disassembly."
Side 116: Incidentally, a lot of the work with hazardous propellants has been done at Edwards. It's located in the middle of the Mojave desert, and you don't have to worry about the neighbors. Even if you spill a ton of liquid fluorine - and that's been done there, just to see what would happen - the only thing that's likely to be damaged is the peace of mind of a few jack rabbits and rattlesnakes.
Side 121: You can throw it around, kick it, put bullets through it, and nothing happens. But if there is a tiny bubble of gas in it, and that bubble is compressed rapidly - possibly by a water-hammer effect when a valve is closed suddenly - it will detonate - violently. This is known as "sensitivity to adiabatic compression," and in this respect it is at least as touchy as nitroglycerine.
Side 122: It is also likely to polymerize in storage, forming gummy polyethylene ethers, which plug up everything.
Side 125: it's not the easiest substance in the world to handle.
Side 127: It sprayed into the chamber, collected in a puddle in the bottom, and then reacted with the wire. The nozzle couldn't cope with all the gas produced, the chamber pressure rose exponentially, and the reaction changed to a high order detonation which demolished the motor, propagated through the fuel line to the propellant tank, detonated the propellant there (fortunately there were only a few pounds in the tank) and wrecked just about everything in the test cell.
Side 134: How he avoided suicide (the first rule in handling liquid oxygen is that you never, never let it come in contact with a potential fuel) is an interesting question, particularly as JPL later demonstrated that you could make the mixture detonate merely by shining a bright light on it.
Side 135: it is incomparably more explosive than any other known substance
Side 135: the explosions of the perchlorate esters are louder and more destructive than those of any other substance; it was necessary to work with minimum quantities under the protection of thick gloves, iron masks [Ha, there, M. Dumas!], and thick glasses, and to handle the vessels with long holders
Side 135: He told me later that the esters were easy enough to synthesize, but that he and his crew had never been able to fire them in a motor, since they invariably detonated before they could be poured into the propellant tank. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that this line of investigation was not further extended.
Side 136: They blew up their setup, which goes to show that it isn't a good idea to try to develop a new type of motor with an experimental propellant. One unknown at a time is plenty to worry about!
Side 148: We were good friends, but it wasn't often that I had a chance to do him in the eye, and it was too good an opportunity to miss.
Side 149: Putting a final report together was sometimes something of a Donnybrook. The committee, as might be imagined, was composed of highly self-confident and howlingly articulate individualists, and there were always at least six of us present each of whom considered himself a master of English prose style. Whew!
Side 149: A test that took a lot longer to decide on was the "Drop-Weight." For years, people in the explosive business had been dropping weights on samples of their wares, and rating their sensitivity on the basis of how far you had to drop how big a weight in order to make the sample go off. We looked into the matter and discovered, to our dismay, that the JPL tester disagreed with the Picatinny tester, which disagreed with the Hercules apparatus, whose results could not be compared with those of the Bureau of American Railroads, which, in turn, contradicted those of the Bureau of Mines. Furthermore, none of them was any good at all with liquids.
Side 151: Well, through a combination of this and that, the motor blew on startup. We never discovered whether or not the traps worked - we couldn't find enough fragments to find out. The fragments from the injector just short-circuited the traps, smashed into the tank, and set off the 200 pounds of propellant in that. (Each pound of propellant had more available energy than two pounds of TNT.) I never saw such a mess. The walls of the test cell - two feet of concrete - went out, and the roof came in. The motor itself - a heavy, workhorse job of solid copper - went about 600 feet down range. And a six-foot square of armor plate sailed into the woods, cutting off a few trees at the root, smashing a granite boulder, bouncing into the air and slicing off a few treetops, and finally coming to rest some 1400 feet from where it started. The woods looked as though a stampeding herd of wild elephants had been through.
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