I was fortunate enough to have a rocket propulsion internship at the Moscow Aviation Institute when I was an undergrad. As I hadn't taken a full-fledged rocket propulsion I bought this book for the trip. After arriving I proudly showed this great tome to my researchers to which they scanned it and replied, "This book is great if you would like to look at pictures and read vague stories about general rocketry, but it doesn't explain at all how to engineer or build anything, so it is worthless." I passed this off as hubris until they gave me a couple of the old Soviet books on rocket engineering full of detailed performance characteristics and equations which were horribly lacking in Sutton. Even with my nonexistent Russian they were more useful than "the tome." Unfortunately I wasn't able to bring their engineering books back with me, but trust me, I was ashamed I had brought Sutton. I ended up not even using it as a door stop. I can hope future versions will get technical but don't count on it. If it hasn't managed to do it in 50 years since it was first published, it probably won't happen.
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