REVIEW: Rockets by Peter Macinnis

TITLE: Rockets. Sulphur, Sputnik and Scramjets.
AUTHOR:  Peter Macinnis
PUBLISHER: Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 1 86508 794 7. Paperback 266 pages
PRICE: A$24.95 in Australia 

David Skea, Reviewer ([EMAIL PROTECTED])

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.
                                                        John Clark, Ignition. 
1972

If you were to think that this book is a description of the various rockets 
that mankind has used over the years you would only be half right. The book is 
really more about the history of rocketry and about what makes a rocket fly: 
that is, what fuels a rocket. But there's more.  

The story starts with gunpowder which was probably used to fumigate houses by 
the Chinese in about 700 BC.  How it came to be developed for that purpose is a 
conjecture and how and why it came to be an explosive fuel is another. However, 
gunpowder soon fuelled Chinese rockets that were then used in war, although 
controlling the flight was not an exact science.  But it did put the 
frighteners into the enemy.  Chinese rockets were adopted by the Mongols and 
then by the Mughals, who used them in India as weapons against the English. 
Seeing a good thing, the English adopted the rocket as a weapon and used it 
against the French, the Danes and the Americans: although it is reported that 
Wellington was not a great advocate of the rocket, as at this time control of 
the rocket was, at best, more of an art than a science and artillery was more 
accurate.

The book progresses through solid fuel propellants into the 20th century and 
the development of liquid rockets fuels and culminates with discussion on the 
German V2, Sputnik, and the space shots that followed.  Part of the story here 
is the mixing of the fuel and the oxidiser and some of the problems associated 
with this.  Mention is made of red fuming nitric acid (RFNA) and other 
'magnificently hypergolic' substances, and of the loss of fingers, limbs and 
life that the experimenters of the time were prone to.

Finally to Scramjet, which is a supersonic combustion ramjet. This is a rocket 
engine that may one day lift mankind into space.  Recently the first flight of 
a Scramjet, the Australian Hyshot project, was made at Woomera. A flight 
witnessed by the author.

I can still remember the excitement when Russia launched Sputnik.  I was a 
young technician working in a telecommunications facility. Soon after the 
announcement of the launch several of the radio engineers gathered in the 
laboratory and detecting the sputnik signal measured its doppler change as it 
passed by.  This was enough information to calculate the speed and hence the 
orbit and period of the new satellite and although the result wasn't 
promulgated to the world (no internet then) the result was one of the first to 
be so derived.

Reading the book was very easy and I enjoyed it so much that I read it through 
for a second time, as it's full of odd facts such as the story of William 
Huskisson's demise.

I knew Huskisson died as a result of a railway accident involving George 
Stephenson's 'Rocket' at the opening of the Liverpool - Manchester railway line 
and there is a statue of him on the Thames embankment in London. What I didn't 
know was that Huskisson, a member of the Tory party, was withholding support 
from its leader and prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, and unless a 
rapprochement could be made the government would fall, which it did within the 
month. The opening of the new railway was considered a suitable venue for the 
meeting and, had Huskisson survived, he might well have led the rebel faction 
back into support of Wellington and saved the government. Now he is only 
remembered as the first victim of a steam passenger railway accident.

The English used rockets against the Americans in the American War of 
Independence and this earned a mention in the US national anthem as "the 
rockets red glare". I knew the words were there but I didn't know of the 
connection until I read it in this book.

Then there's the story of Professor Robert Goddard, who was an early American 
space rocket pioneer, and who was publicly taken to task in 1920 by the New 
York Times for suggesting that rockets could work in a vacuum: the paper only 
retracted this story in 1969. 

This is an entertaining book and one that I'm sure to refer to again so it will 
remain on my bookshelf.