Sometimes corporate speak is good. For example, Space X calling their rocket explosion a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week
while it is a very funny term it’s actually perfectly common rocketry terminology, it’s the technical term for “rocket sploded”
another fun rocketry term is “lithobraking”. Like, one way spaceships lower their orbits is by skimming along the top of the atmosphere, letting the friction slow them down. This is called “Aerobraking”, because they’re using the atmosphere as a brake.
Lithobraking, therefore, is coined by analogy, with “litho-” being the greek root for “stone”. It’s how you slow your spaceship down… by crashing it into the fucking ground.
So a crashed rocket “executed a lithobraking maneuver”.
There’s also “Engine rich exhaust”, which is what happens when your rocket engine starts breaking apart and bits of machinery are burning along with the fuel that’s supposed to be burning.
A more technical term is “Negative periapsis”. Orbits have a periapsis and an apoapsis, the lowest and highest altitude they reach each orbit. A negative periapsis, therefore, is a negative altitude. Your rocket hit the ground.
And related is the term “ablative X”. Ablative heat shielding is a type of heat dissipation where you have a layer of some material covering your spaceship, which heats up into a gas and blows away. So you lose bits of it as you go through the atmosphere. The joke version is when you refer to things as “ablative” when they’re not intended to be: ablative sensors, ablative wings, ablative space probe. that is, your spaceship lost parts it wasn’t supposed to lose while flying through the atmosphere.
