Richard Facio’s Reviews > Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants > Status Update

I only read like 2 pages because I actually started doing my own side research, but like these were 2 very interesting pages. Hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer seems like an interesting propellent choice, a proposed engine tested at MIT catalyzed the peroxide before injecting it with fuel and more peroxide which was really interesting because its kinda like a tripropellant engine or a bi (and a half) propellant engine

This new chapter is about hydrogen peroxide and how not only is it a finicky thing to work with because of its tendency to decompose but also its a good oxidizer. Hydrogen peroxide can be used as a monopropellant if decomposed by a catalyst or in a bi propellant system with the h2o2 serving as the oxidizer.

Less water in acids fuels, nitric acid in this case, are better for higher efficiencies. One problem though, it is very hard to not only get a low/null water concentration, but also to accurately know the water concentration of the acid.

RFNA and WFNA hypergolic propellents are very hard to store for material and temperature reasons. More mixtures are tried again, but with little avail.

More talk about hypergolics, more specifically about rfna and UDMH. Udmh is the proppellant used for the AJ-10 hypergolic rocket engine which was used for the Apollo CSM ME.

The author goes into more history of hypergolic propellents and a description of their reactions. Then the author talks about a research team at richmond in sanfran bay

More discussion of possible mixtures of non hypergolic fuels with hypergolic to make the fuels hypergolic. They didn't really work out that good.

JPL (a lab in America) was looking for a liquid fuel and oxidizer combo that didn't involve o2 and was storable. The teams had a couple difficulties until they were able to finish a motor to put on heavy bombers.

Hybrid motors are being tested in both Amerika and germany as a type of monopropellant or "monogolic". 1940s german scientists thought they had it down but it was actually 20 years until they were actually able to make a reliable hybrid motor.

Scientists in germany are trying to figure out new hypergolic mixtures for standby missles. In the end Nitric acid was one of the best oxidizers found to work with many hypergolic fuels.