26-02-2022, 03:09 PM
(This post was last modified: 26-02-2022, 03:10 PM by Butty Brennan.)
(26-02-2022, 12:59 AM)Tigger Wrote:I think we need another big war to give engineering a boost. (just kidding)(25-02-2022, 09:59 PM)Butty Brennan Wrote: TIL that some of the top scientists of the day were saying that a powered human flight was impossible right up until the Wright brothers did it. Then the scientists said 'oh but he will never be able to do it again with a passenger'.I read atht as human powered not powered human and got confussed
Science 100 years ago was quite unsophisticated. Modern scientific theory is far more accurate and its hyper little brother engineering no longer beats it like it used to.
WW2 and the cold war made a lot of advancements, new technology always starts out as weapons and then they start looking for other applications.
It's just like the Wright brothers story all over again, some of the best and brightest pre WW2 thought that space travel was centuries or thousands of years in the future and the spaceships would need to be enormous to have enough power to break orbit.
And rockets were seen as a waste of time until WW2 kicked off. Look up podcasts about Jack Parsons for good entertainment, he was sort of the evolution of the Wright brothers, he pioneered solid state rocket fuel but he was then airbrushed out of history because he had a VERY weird lifestyle.
https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aero...roots-jpl/