This is a history book about the use of military rockets in the American Civil War. During the Mexican War, many future Civil War generals became familiar with rocket warfare, and the advantage these light-weight weapons had in swampy terrain and on steep hillsides. In the Confederacy, there was active combat -- between the leaders. PGT Beauregard's advocacy of rockets led to conflect between him and Jefferson Davis, and ruined Beauregard's military career. A legendary two-stage rocket, fired from Richmond, missed Washington and may have gone into orbit. In Texas, the contract to manufacture rockets was given to a man already certified as incompetent. Up north, the two rocket regiments were commanded by a man who predicted that his newly-designed rocket gun would shoot "fifteen-foot-wide balls of fire 1,500 yards, terrorizing the traitors." Later medical records suggest that he suffered from syphilis of the brain. A separate chapter outlines the progress in cannon technology which left rocketry far behind, remembered only in the records of bureaucratic infighting and predictions of Great Balls of Fire.