How Rocket Scientists Learn Orbital Dynamics

[Apollo13]

[OrbitusII]

Oh, XKCD, you never cease to amuse.

I'm looking forward to learning some orbital mechanics in more detail during my next 5 years in college, but surely I already know enough from playing KSP.

[cantab]

Well, there's a lot of real-world factors KSP doesn't cover.

But I think it's the case that a physics class can teach you orbital mechanics, and you'd be able to calculate the burns to make to get from one orbit to another in the available delta-V and time, but it takes a simulation like KSP to really learn to intuit things. In the early days of spaceflight NASA themselves, who of course didn't have anything of the sort, took a few goes before they succeeded in an orbital rendezvous.

And now making a retrograde burn to catch up with something ahead of me is the most natural thing in the world.

[TheScareCake!]

How they learn it? Simply. They dont. Real rocket scientists are just.. born with that in their heads. Trust me.

[Red Iron Crown]

When Randall Munroe worked at NASA he wasn't directly involved in spaceflight or other orbital mechanics, the rocket scientists there of course would use those skills a lot more. Still a funny comic, this one too:

[TythosEternal]

While I may be taking the thread too seriously, most actual astrodynamics classes will do one of two things:

A) Try to try teach it too early to a group of students who don't have the appropriate requisites yet, in which case you either fail everyone, or you teach a set of seemingly-unrelated equations without derivations and go heavy on the qualitative stuff like historical context and operations. I've seen this approach taken at shockingly-"good" institutions, by professors who should know better but treat it as no big deal. Really, you might learn more effectively from playing KSP.

First, make sure your students have a basic grasp of vector calculus, conic and spherical geometry, frame transformations, and differential equations. Given that knowledge, astrodynamics itself is surprisingly trivial to teach from basic principles. I am a particularly big fan of Curtis's "Orbital Mechanics"; it has a very logical and scaffolded progression, it is well-written and easy to walk through (even by yourself), and it covers a pretty diverse array of topics in addition to the mechanics themselves (including numerical solutions, body kinematics, and launch trajectory modeling). Here's the obligatory Amazon link to the latest edition, in case you're curious:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0080977472?pc_redir=1409138424&robot_redir=1

Edited September 1, 2014 by TythosEternal
Fixing Typos

[How2FoldSoup]

While I may be taking the thread too seriously, most actual astrodynamics classes will do one of two things:

A) Try to try teach it too early to a group of students who don't have the appropriate requisites yet, in which case you either fail everyone, or you teach a set of seemingly-unrelated equations without derivations and go heavy on the qualitative stuff like historical context and operations. I've seen this approach taken at shockingly-"good" institutions, by professors who should know better but treat it as no big deal. Really, you might learn more effectively from playing KSP.

First, make sure your students have a basic grasp of vector calculus, conic and spherical geometry, frame transformations, and differential equations. Given that knowledge, astrodynamics itself is surprisingly trivial to teach from basic principles. I am a particularly big fan of Curtis's "Orbital Mechanics"; it has a very logical and scaffolded progression, it is well-written and easy to walk through (even by yourself), and it covers a pretty diverse array of topics in addition to the mechanics themselves (including numerical solutions, body kinematics, and launch trajectory modeling). Here's the obligatory Amazon link to the latest edition, in case you're curious:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0080977472?pc_redir=1409138424&robot_redir=1

That book was in my "related to your item" items on amazon hehehe. I bookmarked all of them for a future time when I'm not in school and have more time and money

[Special Agent Sigvan]

They don't. Everyone knows that NASA workers a mythical warriors sent by the heavens to do space maths. They are born with this mystical power and use it to send things into space and debunk the logic of sci-fi movies.

Don't know what that makes KSP Players.