Ignition!

John Clark tells here, with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy, the story of the search for a power packaging which could be trusted to take man into space. Against a lot of the "laws of nature," as they used to be called, it was a hazardous enterprise with no certainty of success or safety. It is the special virtue of this narrative that it is a primary historical document. John Clark actually helped develop explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. He worked with and knew dozens of his peers in an enterprise which eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space. It is quite a story. The reader will find here that the storyteller is as much a part of the story as the equations he occasionally uses. History like this is made by a special sort of person, and that is surely one of the virtues of John Clark's narrative. It leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that experimenting with the basic energies is not for the faint of heart. And that a sense of humor helps when the conflict between matter and energy does not proceed according to the rules. Isaac Asimov's foreword is eloquent on this point: "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...Well, John Clark worked with these miserable concoctions and survived all in one piece. So read this book. You nay get a glimpse of the heroic excitement that seemed to make it reasonable to cuddle with death every waking moment - to say nothing of learning a heck of a lot about the way in which the business of science is really conducted."