Articles tagged with "rocket"

Although the chemicals in rocket propulsion have changed over the years, from kerosene and liquid hydrogen, to complex ammonium perchlorate compounds and more recently liquid methane and oxygen, the basic idea of how it all works is the same - following Newton's idea of action and reaction (or conservation of momentum), if you shove stuff out the back of a rocket, it pushes the rocket forward. The more mass you shove out, and the faster it's shoved, the quicker the rocket moves.

I once met Katherine Smith, the Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Natural Medicine (not a magazine I'd recommend reading - it'll make you angry!). We had an enjoyable chat, and as we were at a wellness and spiritual festival, WellFest, she had no idea I was a skeptic. She showed me her folder of photos and cuttings about the “synchronicity” she'd experienced in her life - a series of spirals, stretching from a spiral painting she made as a young child, through to photos she'd taken in the '80s with faint spirals in the background, and a recent picture of a weird glowing spiral in the sky she'd cut out from a newspaper. I told her that I recognised the sky spiral, that it was a picture from Norway of a Russian rocket booster. Of course she was having none of it - the spiral in the sky was a sign for her, part of a message the universe was sending her through a series of events too unlikely to be coincidence. And of course she wasn't interested in reading into this phenomenon any further - she'd decided what it was, and what it meant to her, and that was enough.

The Chinese launch vehicle - Long March 5B has been in the news over the past week. The rocket was launched at the end of last month to carry the living quarters of China's independent space station into orbit.