Submitted by langos4life t3_z3qthe in space
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Submitted by langos4life t3_z3qthe in space
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Thank you
I recommend playing kerbal space program and trying to land on the moon! It’s a lot of fun and very educational (especially newtons laws of motion)
KSP is a fantastic introduction for those curious about—but not yet entirely familiar with—orbital mechanics. I bought and played KSP when it first released, and it holds an honorable mention in the list of reasons of why I became an aerospace engineer. The fascination of physics and space it instills in the everyday gamer is (at least in my case) wildly understated. I highly recommend that anyone at least remotely intrigued by space pick up a copy of KSP (with KSP 2 coming soon, it's pretty exciting).
With that being said, to answer this post specifically in light of the KSP comment, here's a few things that KSP would have taught (in one way or another) that would have been understood by Apollo trajectory engineers that has not already been mentioned.
Just my two cents (and probably much more, sorry) about what KSP can teach and how that might differ from physical simulations and what the Apollo team would have considered. It is by no means exhaustive or infallible. There was a tremendous amount of work that went into the Apollo program, and I hope both KSP and a part of my explanation could help peak any interest in space :)
Thanks for the info! So cool that ksp got you into aerospace engineering!
Most of these are taught in high school physics. There are additional equations and tricks that are specialized, but all of them are derived from those 4 basic equations.
I'm going to assume that "ecuasions" is a mispelling of equations. While typically not taught at the high school level, a few relevant equations related to the patched conic approximation (or rocketry in general) come to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodynamics)
Come on man of course that’s what he meant
It's hard to tell with these questions. I actually was wondering if this was one of those word-salad sentences and they were asking about "explanations", or there was some untranslated word or something.
It seems like there should be an xkcd about this.
Besides the navigation, which others have mentioned, are equations for temperature and pressure used in the cabin gasses, propellant system and general thermal management. There are inverse square falloff equations for signal strength on the radio transmissions and radar returns. There are basic electrical equations for voltages, current, and resistances in the equipment.
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p0k3t0 t1_ixn7vsj wrote
Universal gravitation.
Newton's laws of motion, of course.
The rocket equation.
The escape velocity formula.