Hilariously Funny That The Guy Known For Wandering Off Without Warning To Look At Birds Was Allowed To

Backyard views

Tuesday February 4th 2025 6:39pm & 6:44pm

The Lonely Neutron Star in Supernova E0102 72.3

Credits: NASA, CXC, ESO, F. Vogt et al., ESO, VLT, MUSE, NASA, STScI

Christmas Tree star cluster

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)

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Aurora on Saturn captured by the Hubble Telescope

"I don't see any god up here. But from here the Earth is beautiful, without borders or divisions."

The first words of a human in space.

Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, April 12, 1961.

Thanks to Clara Statello