John Clark

American chemist who spent his career developing liquid rocket propellants at Thiokol and NOTS — and whose Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants is considered the funniest and most readable book about a technically demanding subject ever written.

Wrote Ignition! as a first-person account of the genuinely dangerous work of testing novel rocket propellants — combining technical rigor with dark humor about the explosions — making rocket chemistry accessible and entertaining to a general audience including Elon Musk.