It's Only Rocket Science by Rogers

[Roger55]

Has anybody looked at the Book: It's Only Rocket Science. It sounds like its for those of us whose last math class was 40 year ago. I vaguely remember that differential Calculus was about finding the slopes of curves and limits,and that I learned large amount of very important stuff in Trig that I had trouble with then.

Yes! Read the manual. But the manual is a PDF file and reading for any real length of time from the screen gives me a wopper of a headache. So it's a long grind. I'm just beyond the quick start. I said somewhere else that I hated whoever started the PDF trend. Even the help books suggested by the Author are PDF files. :facepalm: The only thing I have in the house is a chapter on space flight in Ben Bova's book on writing science fiction (sic).

So I have to get this puppy printed by someone who, unlike myself, has a printer.

But to learn some of that Astrophysics I could start with a real book from the library if its worth the time.

So has anybody seen Dr. Rogers book?

 

[Orbinaut Pete]

Dr. Rogers is on Twitter and is a follower of mine.

If you have a question in 140 characters or less, I can ask her for you, if you like.

 

[Roger55]

Well I can't ask an Author if he book is any good. And I can't ask Dr. Rogers if her book will help me understand Orbiter.

Maybe: will it help me understand orbits and how you simply move about the solar system.

 

[FlyingSinger]

I don't have this book (though I'm thinking I might buy it for my space education collection), but I spent a few minutes using Amazon's "Search inside the book" feature to search for various terms like inclination, rendezvous, ascending node, etc. This way I was able to view quite a few pages of the book and read brief sections. I also downloaded the first (free) chapter of the Kindle version and skimmed it on my iPod Touch. It seems to me that she does quite a nice job in explaining the most important things about space flight, mostly in words, with some diagrams but no math. I've tried to do that myself in "Go Play In Space," though with the goal of using Orbiter, of course. It's not easy - so much depends on the level and goals of your readers. But if you feel that the (free) Orbiter manual and (free) "Go Play In Space" are too big a jump into space terminology (and you prefer a hard copy book over PDF), I would think this book would be a very good starting point.

I would also strongly recommend Wayne Lee's book "To Rise From Earth" which I have and have read. It's out of print but used copies are available through Amazon. Lee works at JPL and does a very good job explaining space flight, with many diagrams. A bit more technical than this book, but still quite down to Earth (so to speak). NOTE: Try to get the revised 1999 version (paperback) rather than the 1995 hard cover. He added a lot of material and color graphics (I think the HC was gray scale graphics). There are used copies of the PB for as little as 31 cents plus $4 shipping! Most are around $4, still a great deal.