Earlier this evening I read about NASA removing all public access to its NASA Technical Reports Server in the wake of the arrest of a former contractor suspected of being a spy. I was outraged at the sheer amount of technical content that was suddenly wiped from the Internet. I respect and understand how important it is to restrict access to sensitive information, however I think that shutting down public access to NTRS completely during this investigation is extreme and hurtful to science and learning.

One of my goals is to learn just enough about aerospace engineering to turn my thoughts in to something tangible (even if virtually so). One thing I feel the need to constantly fight off while learning is the aerospace engineering status quo. It’s sneaky, but it’s everywhere. I was watching a lecture on Moments and Longitudinal static stablility yesterday and the assumptions were being thrown around left and right. You’re going to have a main wing. You’re going to have a horizontal stabalizer, at the back of the plane, and it’s not going to have any camber because that’s what everyone does and oh look it makes the equation easier too!

One of the things I’ve been learning about lately is 2D airfoil design. One of the things I’ve been wanting to do is to plot some of the airfoils from the UIUC Airfoil Coordinates Database. It’s also a great excuse to learn more about D3.js and tinker with it a little.

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been watching (and sometimes just listening to) a course taught at TU Delft in 2011 called Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I. So far it has been a solid introduction to at the very least the things I didn’t know I didn’t know. Early on several things have been a review due to my initial research, but I’m learning a lot with each lecture as well.

We watched several videos from the Flying Machine Arena last night. This is a fantastic series of projects by the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Controls at ETH Zurich.

People have been studying airfoils – the basic shape of stuff like wings, fan blades, propellors, and helicopter rotors – for a really long time. The Wright Brothers, Lilienthal, and others learned about and studied airfoils while conducting their first flights. They even came up with an equation for it so that the lift of an airfoil could be quantified.

This is an experiment in using Jekyll and GitHub pages to organize my ongoing thoughts on aerospace engineering.