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QOTD: Isaac Asimov on Liquid Rocket Fuels
“Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don’t mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
“There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.”
(From the Forward to Ignition!, an Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, by John D. Clark)
Clark’s autobiographical book is an entertaining read and, while giving a fair amount of technical detail, is accessible for those of us who barely remember the chemistry we learned in high school. All that rocketry that looks like magic? Really it’s lots of engineering.
Published in Science and Technology
LOL
Thanks. You would know!
You can fly a picnic table with enough thrust.
Sticking the landing will be dicey.
Paging SpaceX
Or F4 Phantoms.
Very low camber.
“Flying Brick” was one of the F-4’s nicknames. Also “Lead Sled.” “Rhino.” “Old Smokey.”
It actually is not so simple. Airplanes fly upside down, too. :-)
And my understanding of the bumblebee was that early photography undercounted by 50% the number of flaps per second (due to the frame rate on the cameras). So people thought the bumblebee could not fly. Until faster cameras rechecked the work, and found that they could fly, after all. They were relieved to hear it!
I’m reminded…
And if I got this right, when planes fly upside down, they are really flying slightly downwards up into the air while falling slightly upwards downwards.
Yes but they’re doing that with the angling of the wings, not because of the usual lift situation. Wings cannot be designed that would produce ordinary lift, in both directions.
This is what I said.
But the acrobatic type planes are doing it when flying “upright” as well. Not just when they’re upside-down. It wouldn’t make sense to have the wings be producing normal lift when upright – at least not to the usual extent – which would then be actively working against flying upside-down.
No. This is not at all what Adams said. Adams was talking about ALL airplanes and saying that NO wings gain lift by the Bernoulli effect, but work by “planing” on the air “like a boat.”
The reason wings have flaps (and slats) is to increase the camber of the wings during takeoffs and landings. Flaps (and slats) increase lift at the expense of drag.
Percy, we are engineers, and should just know when to quit explaining, so my wife tells me (especially when we are at one of her office Christmas parties).