Design-Centered Introduction to Aerospace Engineering

This book is the product of a course that was developed to meet a horrifying requirement: introduce Aerospace Engineering a.k.a. Rocket Science to students who are fresh out of high school. Assume no background in Calculus, Graphics, Computing, or College Physics or Chemistry. Well, the Wright Brothers did not have A.E. degrees either, and they flew just fine, in a craft that still amazes designers. Several senior students taking Aircraft Design helped me with the standards that had to be met; a book received as birthday present told me the specifications of a new airliner. Advice at a party on Why First-Year Students Are Different, came in very handy indeed. On the first day, several senior colleagues populated the back row of the auditorium, purportedly to learn but possibly in anticipation of seeing me falling on my face. The students were told that they would be “flying” their own airliner designs inside 6 weeks. Whatever they thought of that, they just smiled. And did it. So can you. Hundreds of aerospace engineers have gone through the decades of course experience that now provide the backdrop of this book. The key is for the learner to have a certain amount of faith that there is a method to what looks like madness. It is undeniable that many students who come through the Introduction course, then and now, do better designs, and demonstrate more comfort in the basic disciplines, than what the Seniors could do in a prior era. Somewhere along the way students got tired of designing transonic airliners, and wanted to go straight into their own supersonic planes and spacecraft – and so they did. There is no magic here: just a simplified explanation of how requirements are laid out, a first “guess” is made, and how that that is used to successively reduce uncertainty about every part of the vehicle and its life-cycle. The rigorous analysis that comes in the various disciplines of aerospace engineering, is glimpsed but not allowed to drown the learner at this stage. If the book succeeds, perhaps it may inspire a designer who will make the next generation of supersonic airliners happen. Among many other dreams that await determined effort to realize them.