Comments on: To Vee Or Not To Vee.

By: » The Journey Is More Interesting Than The Destination. The Scientific Gamer

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:05:25 +0000

[...] restrictions on getting somewhere fast revolve on three things I’ve talked about on here before: delta-v costs, the exponential fuel requirements of rocket staging, and Hohmann transfer orbits, which all [...]

By: hentzau

hentzau — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:21:28 +0000

There’s two age groups, 11-14 and 14-17 (some overlap, I think). I wouldn’t even think about bringing this to the younger one, since they have a view of space travel that can best be described as “charmingly simple”. It might work for the older group with a great deal of simplification as they should be at least somewhat familiar with force, velocity and acceleration as physical concepts, but ultimately it would require like ten minutes of explanation just for that when the talk is supposed to be about space colonisation, not space travel. So when it makes it into the talk at all, it’s in the form of the sentence “Moon has one sixth Earth gravity, easier to launch things from Moon.”

By: innokenti

innokenti — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:23:40 +0000

Given the rest of the talk is it something you’d feel comfortable bringing to the younger group? Or would you expect to have to make it much simpler?

By: hentzau

hentzau — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:25:35 +0000

It didn’t even make it into the talk, which made me very sad because I thought it was interesting. But then I think a lot of things are interesting which nevertheless cause room clearances in record times whenever I start talking about them.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:18:08 +0000

How much did you have to alter that for the children?