Ladybird Tuesday - The Rocket

I think that I may have got a little carried away when I found How it Works - The Rocket in a big box of vintage Ladybird books. It's not a subject that I know a huge amount about, and for a children's book it's very complicated!

How it Works - The Rocket is part of Series 654. There are some fascinating sounding books in this series, including The Aeroplane and The Ocean Liner. Although rather dated now - The Rocket was published in 1967 - I'm sure that many of the fundamentals are still the same and the information is still relevant to budding engineers today.

Although it was imminent, this book was written before the first Moon landing. The rockets described in this book are not just used for space travel, they are the rockets launched on Guy Fawkes night, boosters in fighter aircraft, to send equipment to ships in trouble and as missiles. Rockets at the time the book was written were also used to send satellites into orbit, sometimes for scientific purposes such as measuring radiation, for radio and television, or for studying weather.

The book goes into a great deal of detail about how the rocket is propelled into space. We learn about the principes of rocket propulsion, types of propellant, combustion chambers, valves, injectors...I'm afraid that even though I tried to follow it, a great deal of this book went well over my head!

I'm glad to find that it's not just me that found this book complicated. Being Mrs C, who is a lot more knowledgeable about this subject than me, has also written about this book and you can read her post here - The Rocket.

If you love Ladybird books, do pop over and visit Ladybird Tuesday, where Being Mrs C is assembling a really comprehensive catalogue of Ladybird books and reviews.

Below you can find links to all my Ladybird Tuesday book posts.

Snow White and Rose Red
Hansel and Gretel
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
The Three Little Pigs
The Old Woman and her Pig
Little Red Riding Hood
The Ugly Duckling
The Railway Children
A Little Princess
A First book of Aesop's Fables

A Ladybird Book about Knitting
More Things to Make - For Special Occasions
Easy to Make Puppets
Learning to Sew
Stamp Collecting
Tricks and Magic

Prehistoric Animals and Fossils
Dinosaurs
Stone Age Man in Britain
Great Civilisations - Crete
Charles Dickens
Nelson
Lives of the Great Composers Book 1
Lives of the Great Composers Book 2
The Story of Music

Plants and How They Grow
The Ladybird Book of the Night Sky
Sea and Air Mammals
The Farm

The Story of Nuclear Power
The Motor Car
How it Works - The Computer
How it Works - The Rocket
The Story of Ships
The Postman and the Postal Service
People at Work - The Nurse

Understanding Numbers
Talkabout Clothes
Going to School
Teaching Reading

Stories of Special Days and Customs
Christmas Customs

Girls and Boys - A Ladybird Book of Childhood