#rocketry

[unpluggedlamp1]

HI HELLO SPACE LAUNCH SYSTEM ARTEMIS YES HI

ROCKET

it cool

[titleknown]

You ever think of how one of the pioneers of modern rocketry was also a wizard following the wizard-religion of Aliester Crowley?

Which, I feel like if there was one guy who woulda been capable of casting Magic Missile in real life, that would have been him.

[prokopetz]

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)

[supplyside]

Cape Canaveral

[refinedstorage]

Wings of Honneamise // Gainax (1987)

[thererisesaredstar]

Construction of the Buran space shuttle (1982)

[frogshunnedshadows]

Doubtless many space fans have already seen this, but it was new to me: tracking, telescopic, infra-red footage of the Artemis II launch, all the way up to second stage separation (IIRC).

[edwhiteandblue]

March 6, 2009 — The Kepler Space Telescope launches from Cape Canaveral

Kepler, named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, was NASA's first planet-hunting mission and searched for Earth-sized planets outside the solar system. During its nine years of operations, it discovered over 2,600 exoplanets before retiring in October 2018.

image credit: NASA/USAF