I mean, is there even any such thing? Rocketry is a field of engineering, not science – isn’t it?
Yeah, and what’s up with that “Yard o’ Beef”–that sucker’s a foot and a half, tops. Whatever happened to truth in advertising?
I know one thing about rocket science: It’s not brain surgery. 
My dad is a rocket scientist with his PhD in Nuclear Physics. And yes, he has worked on rockets.
Building the rocket is engineering and is the easy part. Orbital mechanics is the hard part and more art than science.
But what about rocket surgery?
What about brain ROCKETS? Now there’s a concept!
Smart bombs.
I think you have them backwards. Designing, building and launching a rocket is still a very difficult problem. The design margins are slim and there are many things that can go wrong. A 90% success rate is doing well. For most things, orbital mechanics is a solved problem.
I think that in general, state-of-the art new technology starts off as a science, and only becomes engineering once the science is figured out. Early rocket science is a “science” since they had to come up with the laws and equations for dealing with rockets; there was a lot of research and experimentation just to figure out what exactly was going on, let alone how to control it. Nowadays, a lot of what people call “rocket science” falls under the domain of aerospace engineering.
If a field of science is mature and well-understood, its application is engineering. If it’s not, and there’s plenty of cutting edge research going on about the fundamentals, it’s a “pure” science.
Another analogous comparison: Chemical Engineers take what’s known about chemistry, and use that to do things like create products for companies like Dow. Research chemists are experimenting with what is unknown in their field, trying to learn new things about chemistry.
My Physics Professor, talking to my class after writing an equation on the board: “What do people say when something is really easy and simple…?”
My Class: “It’s a piece of cake!”
My Physics Prof: “Well, yeah, that too, but sometimes they say…?”
My Class: “…”
My Physics Prof: “They say it’s not Rocket Science! Well this equation IS Rocket Science!”
I can’t remember the equation (which may explain my struggles in physics), but it was a great teaching moment, IMO. I always imagine Rocket Science to be a bunch of physics equations and formulas, wit ha whole lot of smart people figuring out how to make stuff be rocket like.
Many people out here list their profession on things like loan and lease applications as “rocket scientist”. They work for places where all the money comes from NASA contracts. What better definition is there.
[one whacking aside] Now THAT’s a great exclamation. I realize from my lowly newbie non-member position I probably amn’t able to make such a proclamation, but were I an actual member of some note, I’d recommend that this be added to the SDMB Collection of SDMBisms. " ‘Wit ha!’ he exclaimed, chagrined". See? It’s just lovely. Kudos to you Boscibo![/whacking aside]
My husband got his degree in geology and geophysics, so sometimes we tell people he studied to be a rock scientist.
But rocketry is an applied science, or several applied sciences. I’d say that makes your dad more of an engineer.
One of the funniest cartoons I’ve ever seen — it may have been a Far Side strip — depicted a bunch of brain surgeons standing around a patient in the operating room, looking confused. The head surgeon is saying to his assistants, “C’mon guys, this isn’t auto mechanics!”
How is engineering not science? :dubious:
My brother’s FIL worked on the infrared camera for the Javelin missle (the very portable tank killer), and has himself described as a rocket scientist. I think he’s stretching it.
According to The National Society for Professional Engineers engineering is “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.” This suggests that engineering is applied science.
I asked my dad about this and he said, "An engineer is primarily motivated to make things that work while a scientist is primarily motivated to determine how things work. I am more motivated by determining how things work, but since I get paid to make things work, my job is more engineering. My primary motivation is to figure out what was happening. I use this knowledge to then make something that works. If I stumbled on a solution that worked, but I did not know why, I would not like it.
Some time ago we made a product that passed all of the required tests, but it did not perform as I thought that it should have. It kept bugging me that it did not perform the way that I thought that it should. We eventually determined how to make a small modification to the design so that it performed the way that I always thought that it should. We now have a device that is a better design, which is good from an engineering perspective. As an Engineering manager, that made me happy. We also have a device that performs the way that my analysis said that it should perform, so as a scientist I was happy."
None of my engineer friends/family members are currently online but I would be interested in seeing what they say about that definition.
“C’mon, it’s not rocket science,” is an obsolete phrase. When I was a kid in the early 1950s, it had some real weight. Robert Goddard and Werner Von Braun were amazing, and their standing was close to that of wizards. It’s hard to understand now, but when Sputnik went up, putting the first man-made device in orbit around the earth, it was jaw-droppingly astonishing. :eek: All it did was emit a steady beeping radio signal as it passed by, but golly! It was more than the US rocket scientists could do. Many of our Vanguard rockets crashed on launch. Yes, rocket science was some bad shit back then.
Today, we have pictures from the surface of Mars, taken by a machine that landed exactly where it was supposed to land. We’ve seen folks bounce around joyously on Earth’s moon. It’s not amazing anymore; rocket science? Eh, so what?
Maybe today we should be saying, “C’mon, it’s not nanotubing!” :dubious: