You Will Not Go To Space Today (Solution)

by Robyn Speer

These are descriptions of Course 16 classes in the style of XKCD's "Up Goer Five". You need to compare them with the actual descriptions in the course catalog, and find the original text that corresponds to the highlighted phrases.

16.00 (Introduction to Aerospace and Design)

Original text: The fundamental concepts and approaches of aerospace engineering are highlighted through lectures on aeronautics, astronautics, and design. Active learning aerospace modules make use of information technology. Student teams are immersed in a hands-on, lighter-than-air (LTA) vehicle design project where they design, build, and fly radio-controlled LTA vehicles. The connections between theory and practice are realized in the design exercises. Required design reviews precede the LTA race competition...

We'll start by making clear some of the easiest ideas and plans in building things that go up. We'll talk about things that fly, things that go to space, and how to get ideas to make these things good. You'll learn quickly about up-goers because you'll be working with computers that tell you when you're learning the right things. You and your team will use your hands as you come up with up-goers that go up because they're lighter than air. First you come up with them, then you build them, then you make them fly in the right direction by sending them the kind of waves you can also listen to. This will help you learn how things that are supposed to work are kind of like things that actually work. After we check whether your ideas are good or bad, there's a part where you try to make the up-goer your team made go faster than the ones other teams made...

Extracted phrase: CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

16.06 (Principles of Automatic Control)

Original text: Introduction to design of feedback control systems. Properties and advantages of feedback systems. Time-domain and frequency-domain performance measures. Stability and degree of stability. Root locus method, Nyquist criterion...

You'll learn how to make good ways to control things that watch what they're doing and fix it. You'll learn what these things that fix themselves are like and why they're good, how to tell when they're good by watching when things happen or how often things happen, how to tell whether things are staying like they're supposed to and by how much, pictures you can look at that are one way to tell whether things are getting staying like they're supposed to...

Extracted phrase: DEGREE OF STABILITY

16.110 (Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics)

Original text: Aerodynamic analysis of flight vehicles using analytical, numerical, and experimental techniques separately and in combination. Matched asymptotic expansions. Farfield behavior. Finite wing theory...

There are lots of ways to tell whether things that are supposed to fly are good at flying. You can write down a lot of things and think about them, you can work with a lot of numbers, you can just try things and see what works, and sometimes you can even do all of these at the same time. You'll learn how to match the way things act up close to the different way they act from far away, how to look at the way wind goes around flying arms from far away, how to understand flying arms that end instead of the ones that don't end that aren't real...

Extracted phrases: MATCHED ASYMPTOTIC EXPANSIONS, FINITE WING THEORY

16.120 (Compressible Internal Flow and Aeroacoustics)

Original text: Internal compressible flow and fundamentals of acoustics and aerodynamic sound with applications in turbomachinery and propulsion systems. Quasi-one-dimensional compressible flow (channel flow) and extensions, including effects of shock waves, friction, energy and mass addition, swirl, and flow non-uniformity. Unsteady compressible flow, theory of sound, sources of sound and wave propagation, Lighthill's acoustic analogy, and characterization and estimation of noise sources encountered in turbomachinery and aircraft applications.

Things that fly often have lots of stuff moving around in the things that make them go, and that stuff gets kind of bigger and smaller when it needs to. This is actually pretty much the way sound works, too, so we'll start with how you can talk about stuff that moves when you fly in the same way you talk about sound and how it hits things. When you understand sound you can use it to understand things that go around fast and things that go forward. One way to look at moving stuff is to say it's all moving back and forward on a straight line, like it's on a track. That's how you start to learn about other things, like what happens to moving stuff when you are going really fast and it piles up in front of you, why moving stuff slows down, what happens when two kinds of moving stuff get together and now there's more stuff that's moving more, stuff that goes around and around as it moves, and stuff that moves in different ways in different places. Next we'll talk about stuff that moves and gets bigger and smaller but you're not quite sure what it's going to do next, what all this sound stuff is anyway, where sounds and waves come from and where they go, how to pretend that all the noise making stuff going on inside a thing that makes you go is just a few things that make noise in four directions, and how to talk about all the noise that flying things make and how much noise there is.

Extracted phrases: SHOCK WAVES, LIGHTHILL'S ACOUSTIC ANALOGY

16.346 (Astrodynamics)

Original text: Fundamentals of astrodynamics; the two-body orbital initial-value and boundary-value problems with applications to space vehicle navigation and guidance for lunar and planetary missions with applications to space vehicle navigation and guidance for lunar and planetary missions including both powered flight and midcourse maneuvers...

Here we get to the easy things about things that move in space. One of these is the way two things in space go around each other. You can tell this from the way everything starts or the way things work on the outside. When you know this, you can use it to make space cars go in the right direction, and sometimes make them go in the right direction to get to that near world that people went to or others that people can't go to yet. Two ways to make space cars go in the right direction are to make them throw out lots of fire or to make them throw out a little bit of fire to speed up, slow down, or change direction after going half way...

Extracted phrases: GUIDANCE FOR LUNAR AND PLANETARY MISSIONS, POWERED FLIGHT

16.512 (Rocket Propulsion)

Original text: Chemical rocket propulsion systems for launch, orbital, and interplanetary flight. Modeling of solid, liquid-bipropellant, and hybrid rocket engines. Thermochemistry, prediction of specific impulse...

This is where we talk about the stuff you burn to go really fast. A space car needs parts that burn a lot of stuff to go up from the ground, go around the ground by going so fast to the side that you miss the ground all the time, and go to other worlds with their own ground. The stuff burning thing can burn dry stuff, two kinds of wet stuff that you mix together, or both. An important thing to know about this is how hot it gets when you burn the stuff and how much it makes you go...

Extracted phrase: LAUNCH, ORBITAL, AND INTERPLANETARY FLIGHT

Extraction

Filling in the labeled blanks arranges some of the letters in the phrases to form this message:

THERE WAS ONCE A SPACE CAR
THAT DID NOT GO TO SPACE
A GUY EXPLAINED ON TV
IT WAS BECAUSE A RING IN IT
GOT HARDER AS IT GOT COLDER
HE SHOWED THE PROBLEM BY
PUTTING A RING IN ICE WATER
CALL IN HIS FIRST
AND LAST NAME
The answer is RICHARD FEYNMAN.