NASA's Nuclear Frontier; The Plum Brook Reactor Facility, 1941-2002
Washington DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of External Relations, History Division, 2004. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. x, 187, [3]] pages. Illustrations( nearly 150 images). Endnotes. Appendices (includes timeline, reactor experiments, reactor cycle dates, and organizational charts). This is number 33 in the Monographs in Aerospace History series. Bottom edge shows some soiling and staining. Minor previous damp signs. Mark D. Bowles is Professor of History at American Public University System, founder of HistoryFeeddotorg, and author of 14 books on the history of science and technology. He earned his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1999, and was a Tomash Fellow at the University of Minnesota. He also has MA in history, an MBA in technology management, and a BA in psychology. Dr. Bowles has worked full time at American Public University System for over five years. He has also founded a public history company, BelleHistorydotcom. Robert S. Arrighi was with the NASA History Division. This book is a visual history of the Plum Brook reactor, including numerous images and captions, a narrative history, and selected primary documents. It begins with the acquisition of the Plum Brook farmland by the government at the start of World War II and discusses its use as a significant ordnance works for the war effort. At the same time, scientists worldwide were making tremendous progress on a roughly fifty-year investigation of the mysterious world inside the atom and the enormous reserve of power it appeared to contain. This work culminated in the atomic bomb. After the war, as Plum Brook’s ordnance factories went silent, scientists continued their pursuit of nuclear knowledge by constructing test reactors. One specific aim for this research in the 1950s was to build a nuclear-powered airplane. In 1956 NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), began to design and build a massive test reactor at Plum Brook. The Plum Brook Reactor Facility became one of the primary research facilities to test materials for a nuclear rocket. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: NASA, Nuclear Reactor, Nuclear Rocket, Plum Brook Reactor, Test Facilities, Nuclear Facilities, Experimental Program
[Book #78376]
Price: $50.00