Aerospace Engineering on the Back of an Envelope

Download or read book Aerospace Engineering on the Back of an Envelope written by Irwin E. Alber and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineers need to acquire “Back-of-the-Envelope” survival skills to obtain rough quantitative answers to real-world problems, particularly when working on projects with enormous complexity and very limited resources. In the case studies treated in this book, we show step-by-step examples of the physical arguments and the resulting calculations obtained using the quick-fire method. We also demonstrate the estimation improvements that can be obtained through the use of more detailed physics-based Back-of-the-Envelope engineering models. These different methods are used to obtain the solutions to a number of design and performance estimation problems arising from two of the most complex real-world engineering projects: the Space Shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope satellite.