#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).

[purplemonkeysexgod69]

One of the kiddos is in 4-H, and one of the projects she joined this year was rocketry. They spent the last few monthly meetings building their tiny 12-inch cardboard rockets. Yesterday was launch day. We drove hours to some place in the Central Valley where it was legally permitted for the public to launch rockets. Apparently it’s a popular hobby.

Some of the rockets people brought were more than six feet tall, some equipped with devices that track their altitude and descent. One of the rockets reached an altitude of 6,200 feet. Most did not go that high.

It wasn’t lost on me that these things looked like missiles; albeit with plastic warheads. Probably not the place to be if you’ve fought in a war or have suffered through it and have PTSD.

Occasionally the parachutes would fail to deploy and the rockets would take a parabolic path straight into the ground. Or a rocket would explode midair and fall apart, scattering debris. Or the rocket would go off course and head toward where everyone was standing. The launch coordinator often yelled over the P.A. system for people to watch out.

They even had a “piñata rocket” loaded with candy so that when the parachutes deployed, it also dropped candy, and the kids would run around the debris field to gather it.

Surreal, considering the state of the world.

The science, the physics, the spectacle... it was fun. Tinged with a little sadness at the realization that the same science and physics are also used for war. Science is cool until it isn’t. Like splitting an atom.