Astronautics

Astronautics (or cosmonautics) is the practice of sending spacecraft beyond Earth's atmosphere into outer space. Spaceflight is one of its main applications and space science is its overarching field.

The term astronautics (originally astronautique in French) was coined in the 1920s by J.-H. Rosny, president of the Goncourt academy, in analogy with aeronautics.^[1] Because there is a degree of technical overlap between the two fields, the term aerospace is often used to describe both at once. In 1930, Robert Esnault-Pelterie published the first book on the new research field.^[2]

The term cosmonautics (originally cosmonautique in French) was introduced in the 1930s by Ary Sternfeld with his book Initiation à la Cosmonautique (Introduction to cosmonautics)^[3] (the book brought him the Prix REP-Hirsch, later known as the Prix d'Astronautique, of the French Astronomical Society in 1934.^[4])

As with aeronautics, the restrictions of mass, temperatures, and external forces require that applications in space survive extreme conditions: high-grade vacuum, the radiation bombardment of interplanetary space and the magnetic belts of low Earth orbit. Space launch vehicles must withstand titanic forces, while satellites can experience huge variations in temperature in very brief periods.^[5] Extreme constraints on mass cause astronautical engineers to face the constant need to save mass in the design in order to maximize the actual payload that reaches orbit.

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System activated. T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero and liftoff. . .You know I often get asked how I got interested in space is this something that happened as a childhood dream? Yeah, in a sense. You know when I was growing up as a young child, I'm old enough, that was before Sputnik; before any humans had been in space. I was in New York City, my dad used to take me to the planetarium all the time, he was kind of interested in astronomy and I don't know what it was that clicked but there was just something about space. It represented the future. I mean, the public media at those times mostly of course newspapers, magazines, televisions, they were full of stories about the coming space age, so it was just really exciting. Jeff was the first astronaut to log more than 1000 hours aboard the space shuttle. He made five space shuttle missions including the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Here at MIT Jeff is a fabulous educator. He's very active in teaching both undergraduate and graduate classes in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In fact Jeff teaches 16.00: our freshman introductory aerospace class, which is what 16.00x was in part based on. MIT started to join the revolution in online education creating the MITx program which feeds into the material into the edX platform and we decided that this introductory course would be a good thing to share with a much wider audience throughout the world. So 16.00 became 16.00x. 16.00x is unique in that its a technical course but its also available to the general public. So we try to present complex topics in a way that is very accessible to everyone. Even those without a technical background. And I think thats what really contributed to the appeal and the popularity of this course worldwide because there are so many people who are very interested in spaceflight but thought it would take so much engineering education for me to even begin to understand what thats all about. But we've actually tried to make the course as accessible as possible so that students can still get the basic ideas of what astronautics and human spaceflight is all about without having gone through an engineering education. It's not a trivial task putting on an online course. It takes a lot of personnel in making the course in the first place. We had people looking after the video to actually do the video filming. And of course before that I had to write out scripts that were much more, I think, extensive and detailed then when I'm talking in class because you really have to tailor the lectures to an online audience with which you don't have direct give-and-take contact. When I'm talking in class I can look at the students and I can look at their eyes. I can see are they paying more attention to reading their email on their computers or are they paying attention to me. That direct face-to-face interaction you don't get. I'm talking to a TV camera right now and thats how I have to give my lectures. And I'm pretty used to talking to cameras so I can do it. I can treat the camera almost as a person, but you don't get that direct feedback. And so we have to structure the course so that I give my lectures and then we try and make problem sets and in that way try to gauge whether the online students are actually getting the material. And I'm delighted it seems to have been very popular and we've gotten a lot of really, really nice feedback. Do you have any feedback for the course facilitators? "Well I'd like to say that the fact that the lectures were so well explained and engaging may be the reason I was so successful in this course. So it was a very interesting class, I enjoyed it a lot and I'm proud to have been associated with it. Thank you. You know, MIT is a distant dream. But you guys help us make that dream come true. So give us more and more and more of the MIT experience. Thank you. One of the biggest strengths about 16.00x is that we had an enormous and very diverse student population. We had over 12,000 students enrolled online and they come from almost 150 different countries. And this led to one of the challenges with the course as well because students coming from so many different backgrounds we had to make sure they were all on the same page. And its really exciting to see so many of these things coming together: the people, the technology, the ideas and the passion for education, culminating in something like 16.00x and really extending MIT's reach to have global impact. Its just the topic. I mean spaceflight is something that a lot of people are interested in but they don't really know much about it. And having the opportunity to learn about it for free, from an astronaut who is also a professor at MIT, that is just such an incredible and unique opportunity that really would only exist in the online community. I think it does indicate that there are real changes going on in education and we have yet to figure out how online courses are ultimately going to change public education but we know enough now to know that exciting things are happening and it was great being a part of this in the early days of online learning with 16.00x. Don't lose sight of the big picture. Remember that the reason you became and aerospace engineer was because you dreamed of flight. Never, never forget your dreams.

History

The early history of astronautics is theoretical: the fundamental mathematics of space travel was established by Isaac Newton in his 1687 treatise Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.^[6] Other mathematicians, such as Swiss Leonhard Euler and Franco-Italian Joseph Louis Lagrange also made essential contributions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In spite of this, astronautics did not become a practical discipline until the mid-20th century. On the other hand, the question of spaceflight puzzled the literary imaginations of such figures as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian cosmist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky derived the rocket equation, the governing equation for a rocket-based propulsion, enabling computation of the final velocity of a rocket from the mass of spacecraft ( $m_{1}$ ), combined mass of propellant and spacecraft ( $m_{0}$ ) and exhaust velocity of the propellant ( $v_{e}$ ).

\Delta v\ =v_{e}\ln {\frac {m_{0}}{m_{1}}}

By the early 1920s, Robert H. Goddard was developing liquid-propellant rockets, which would in a few brief decades become a critical component in the designs of such famous rockets as the V-2 and Saturn V.

The Prix d'Astronautique (Astronautics Prize) awarded by the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society, was the first prize on this subject. The international award, established by aviation and astronautical pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie and André-Louis Hirsch, was given from 1929 to 1939 in recognition of the study of interplanetary travel and astronautics.

By the mid-1950s, the Space Race between the USSR and the US had begun.

Subdisciplines

Although many regard astronautics itself as a rather specialized subject, engineers and scientists working in this area must be knowledgeable in many distinct fields.

Astrodynamics – the study of orbital motion. Those specializing in this field examine topics such as spacecraft trajectories, ballistics and celestial mechanics.
Spacecraft propulsion – how spacecraft change orbits, and how they are launched. Most spacecraft have some variety of rocket engine, and thus most research efforts focus on some variety of rocket propulsion, such as chemical, nuclear or electric.
Spacecraft design – a specialized form of systems engineering that centers on combining all the necessary subsystems for a particular launch vehicle or satellite.
Controls – keeping a satellite or rocket in its desired orbit (as in spacecraft navigation) and orientation (as in attitude control).
Space environment – although more a sub-discipline of physics rather than astronautics, the effects of space weather and other environmental issues constitute an increasingly important field of study for spacecraft designers.
Bioastronautics

Related fields of study

References

^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-08-11. Retrieved 2017-02-02.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^ "ROBERT ESNAULT-PELTERIE, « l'Astronautique » - Encyclopædia Universalis". Archived from the original on 2014-04-29. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
^ Gruntman, Mike (2007). From Astronautics to Cosmonautics. p. 21. ISBN 978-1419670855.
^ l'Astronomie, 1934, p. 325–326.
^ Understanding Space: An Introduction to Astronautics, Sellers. 2nd Ed. McGraw-Hill (2000)
^ Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, Bate, Mueller, and White. Dover: New York (1971).

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