Below is an article that is upcoming in the NASA Alumni newsletter without images. “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Modern rocketry began with foundational work by pioneers such as Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, and the American Rocket Society. Their theoretical and experimental advances …
Continue reading “The Three Pillars of Rocketry Culminating in Human Spaceflight”
“The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” – Robert H. Goddard While Dr. Robert H. Goddard was advancing rocketry through private experiments, another group of American enthusiasts independently pursued space exploration. Formed in the early 1930s, the American Rocket Society (ARS) emerged as an organization that not only …
Continue reading “Research Notes on The American Rocket Society”
“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” – Hermann Oberth Hermann Oberth’s theoretical breakthroughs transformed rocketry from speculative fiction into science, thus influencing the development of modern space exploration. His mentorship of Wernher von Braun and contributions to the V-2 rocket program set foundational principles that shape the field. Germany’s major figure in …
I wrote about this experiment and discussed it with funding agencies long ago and just wanted to post the idea. I am exploring the possibility of conducting high-Reynolds number turbulence experiments. One experiment would involve constructing a large isolated vessel filled with liquid helium to create fully developed, spatially localized high-Re flow through transient forcing …
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky In 1903, Tsiolkovsky wrote an article called, “Exploration of outer space by means of rocket devices,” in The Science Review. Born in September 1857 in the village of Izhevskoye, Russia, Tsiolkovsky was the fifth child in a …
One of the earliest documented uses of rockets was in China. Father Antoine Gaubil, a French Jesuit missionary and historian, described an event in his 1739 writings, “When it was lit, it made a noise that resembled thunder and extended 24 km. The place where it fell was burned, and the fire extended more than …
Lately, I have been examining the entire history of hypersonics research and technology, with a particular focus on the re-entry problem and ablation for small vehicles, such as those from ballistic missiles. While reviewing the writings of Wernher von Braun, I was amused to find that he joked about using frozen balsa wood as a …
Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light… That pause was …
Our present research airplanes have developed startling performance only by the use of rocket engines and flying essentially in a vacuum. Testing airplanes designed for transonic flight speeds at Mach numbers between 2 and 3 has proven, mainly, the bravery of the test pilots and the fact that where there is no drag, the rocket …
Because an effort is likely impossible and impractical does not mean it is not worth attempting. The Navier-Stokes equations and turbulent flow represent the last great classical problem in physics. Since the time of Leonard Euler and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, many have devoted much of their lives to working on these problems. Although they …
