Rocket Surgery?
Personally, I have found these things to be the hardest:
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Figuring out what you really want to do with your life.
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Interpersonal relationships -sometimes I think it would be easier to navigate a mine field than figuring out if someone actually wants honesty, or how much honesty, when they ask for your advice, etc.
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Potty-training ferrets. Training ferrets, period. They are stubborn.
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Interpreting Lacan and Derrida. If I stretch my mind far enough, I can glance their meanings at the periphery of my understanding.
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Managing money and balancing your monetary priorities with your SO’s.
[QUOTE=Antinor01]
Understanding women.
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I was going to respond with something else, but then I read this. You got me. :smack:
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
During the original program it was estimated that a “clean” ORION type rocket using high efficiency boosted fission bomblets launching from a solid pad would produce less radioactive fallout than a coal-fired energy generating plant; it wasn’t an insignificant hazard (roughly equivilent to a single multi-megaton range nuclear weapon) but not the kind of world-ending threat some fear, either. There’s probably less hazard from the products of this than from groundwater contamination using toxic, caustic chemical fuels previously used in commerical rockets. (However, the manufacture and processing of nuclear material produces its own toxic, caustic, and radioactive wastes.)
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Actually, I’ve little problem with a single use of nuclear pulse propulsion, for the reasons you’ve stated. What my real problem is that I doubt that in the event that the political and social capital is spent to get the public to accept nuclear pulse propulsion there’s going to be little reason on the part of some people to keep from using it as a routine launch process.
The fallout from a single multi-megaton range nuclear weapon isn’t really something I worry about. (Especially post-Chernobyl) I do prefer that such things be kept, as often as possible, to a series of one.
And let me throw out this sea-anchor, too - what I would oppose for the purposes of launch propulsion from Earth is very different from what I’d oppose for the purposes of interplanetary propulsion. (I’ll admit I like the idea of the nuclear salt rocket.)
[QUOTE=Hogwash]
Rocket Surgery?
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That’s IT! I’m absolutely going to use this one. Most of the other posts can’t really be summed up in an expression.
Accurate 10-day weather forecasts
[QUOTE=Julia_Leapyear]
"…I now have a friend who is a rocket scientist…
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I also have a friend who’s a rocket scientist over at Kennedy.
He’s got a T-shirt that says, “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist!”
Different strokes for different folks. I knew a woman that effortlessly put herself through 8 years of med school but left her DVD player unused for three months until her dad hooked it up for her. 
[QUOTE=Julia_Leapyear]
That’s IT! I’m absolutely going to use this one. Most of the other posts can’t really be summed up in an expression.
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I think Brain Science gives Rocket Surgery a run for its money.
I always thought that the point of the sayings wasn’t just that the disciplines were hard, it’s that they were finicking and if you made a mistake there would be catastrophic, uncorrectable consequences.
So saying something isn’t rocket science or brain surgery means that you don’t have to bother working at it until it’s perfect, you can stop when it’s good enough.
Understanding the United States Income Tax rules and regs.
[QUOTE=Waverly]
And that is the point. Launch success is astonishingly low, redundant quality control is a necessity, and production is slow and tedious because no time or money has been invested in more elegant solutions. It is a more conservative discipline than banking. Rocket science embraces the status quo whereas most other sciences keep questioning and pushing the envelope. That is why I don’t think rocket science is the gold standard for excellence in science and engineering.
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When the status quo gives you a better than 90% chance of success, and being a pioneer is a synonym for mission failure, people will be conservative. When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a launcher and its payload, you try to minimize risk. Very few organizations have the funding needed to do a new design from scratch and watch launch after launch end in failure while the bugs are worked out. The physics of the problem dictate safety margins that would horrify most engineers.
There is no easy road to the stars.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
The MOHS scale of hardness
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Falling Off a Log
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Pie
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Sunday Morning
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Quartz
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Selling Ice to Eskimos
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Chinese Algebra
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Rocket Science
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Brain Surgery
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Dying
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Comedy
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Herding cats
Peace in the Middle East.
String theory; at least they can test rockets.
Curing cancer.
Land war in Asia.
Finding a good man. Makes Rocket Science look like playing hopscotch!
Being in a relationship.
[QUOTE=mks57]
being a pioneer is a synonym for mission failure
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Really? Tell that to Burt Rutan.
Among other things, getting people off the path of least resistance is harder than rocket science.
[QUOTE=Waverly]
Really? Tell that to Burt Rutan.
Among other things, getting people off the path of least resistance is harder than rocket science.
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How much hardware has he put into orbit?
Rutan is a genius, but there is a huge difference between doing suborbital test flights and putting stuff in orbit.
How 'bout this one … my husband’s cousin used to work at NASA, but because her project kept getting delayed, she got bored and quit. So she went to medical school to become a neurologist.
The jokes just write themselves!