tgray

Rockets! 🚀

The general idea is to shoot stuff (propellant) really fast out the back of your engine. We can thank Newton’s 3rd law of motion for moving us in the other direction. This is true for rockets and jet engines. Jet engines are air breathing engines. Rockets aren’t.

The quick description of (chemical) rockets is that we take the propellant and start a chemical reaction in it. This reaction releases energy in the chemical bonds and heats up the byproducts. The hot byproducts shoot out of the back through a specially designed nozzle, which pushes the rocket in the other direction. So easy!

tgray

Now I work on in-space propulsion. Plasma plays a role there but first we’ll detour into chemical propulsion (rockets!) for context. Warning, last time I took chemistry was 10th grade. More tomorrow… 🔬🚀

tgray

I need to get back to my thread about science and space technology. Last time, I mentioned some fusion schemes. Long story short, the idea is to confine you plasma in a bottle for long enough, and then get it really hot. You know, like >100,000,000 °C. No big deal. 🚀🔬

tgray

Indieweb concepts are very cool. Indieweb concepts are very frustrating to implement. There needs to be an Indieweb ‘stack’ that is easy to install and provides auth, micropub, and webmention support. Extra points if it supports static blogging and is somewhat configurable.