Fazi's Revenge: Shooting For The Moon

This book is not actually about revenge. This book details a thought experiment to build on some fundamental ideas that were introduced previously in Fazi’s World.I joked with my kids that the titles of sequels often allude to the idea of revenge- and said that if I ever wrote a follow-up to Fazi’s World it would be called Fazi’s Revenge.This is a moonshot thought-experiment focused on considering the problems of flight-path planning and control- and has overlooked any detail on actual rocketry and booster control. Rocketry is all about the tanking and the controlled pumping and mixing of oxidizer and propellant in a combustion chamber- and directing the resulting exhaust pressure out of a booster nozzle. That’s all there really is to it. Apart from working out how much oxidizer and propellant is needed, and how to tank it safely- and how to do the pumping and mixing in a controlled way that’s not explosively self-destructive. Then the nozzle itself has to be gimballed and controlled to ensure the reaction force it generates is directed to act through the vehicles center of gravity. Thrust that is not properly directed through the vehicular center of gravity will send the rocket spinning out of control. And that’s a whole other can of worms that I will leave as a challenge for others to write on.This is not an easy read. This read requires genuine effort and diligence and time to thoroughly work through some of the specific ideas presented- to properly conceptualize what’s going on. The content is very light on math- just some very basic trigonometry- but there is a level of technical detail that will quickly dissolve into meaningless words if plenty of time is not taken to fully digest each nugget properly. Many of the chunks may require reading and re-reading to properly grasp what is being proposed. The pay-off is not the raw information itself- but the brief intellectual growth-spurt required to make sense of it.No pain- no gain.Contents- Shooting for the Moon; When to Launch; The Lunar Plane; Aligning a Heading/Roll Gyro with the Lunar Plane; Lunar Ground Track; Solar Ground Track; Alignment Recap; Sensing and Controlling Pitch; Orbital Pitch Measurement and Control; The Magnetosphere; Detecting the Vertical Component of Geomagnetic Flux; Translunar Injection- Pitch Measurement and Control; Controlling 'Pitch Over' During Ascent to Orbit; Translunar Injection- Peeling out of Orbit into Translunar Flight; Redefining the Earth Orbit Departure Angle- Hohmann Transfer; Free Return Trajectory; Putting On The Brakes- Return to Earth Orbit; De-Orbit Read more