🚀 go-pugleaf

jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
>I have no explanation for the phenomenon, but lose
>no sleep over it, thinking of Lord Kelvin of the 
>Royal Society who published proof after proof that man
>could not fly in heavier-than-air machines, and thinking
>of all those articles in learned journal which, in my
>childhood, repeated that we could never go to the moon
>because of the "vitesse de libe'ration" (don't know the
>term in English, still remember it in French).

"Escape velocity". I think the problem the early researchers had was the idea
that the only way to achieve "vitesse de liberation" was to quickly accelerate
to that speed from the ground. They didn't take into account slower
acceleration rates (but longer ones) and slingshotting. I believe that when
slingshoting was invented, it was a total revolution in the science of rocketry
and spacecrafts. I think because I seem to remember doing research in Grade 7
about moon flights and found that books before slingshotting were either
"fantastique" or rather pessimestic. Post slingshot had authors doing orbit
trajectories to Mars and back with minimal fuel costs. I really don't know the
date this happened (been awhile since I did that project), but it isn't
mentioned specifically in the books I have read. But then again, I could just
be ignorant. Could someone 'learn' me? :-)
(Edumacate me, that is). :-)


-- 
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Travers Naran                                           | "We fear
Mail address: naran@fraser.sfu.ca or naran@sfu.ca       |  change. WHACK!
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada       | WHACK! WHACK!"
Cmpt. Science student wanna-be                          | -Garth 
Trekker, Leaper, Red Dwarf'er, Prober, etc.             |  "Wayne's World"
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