[David Brinza]

Originally Posted by craigbutcher

When seeking guidance, look up. There is a very good website with the basics, not only on ballistics, but also on other cool and significant topics. I am really very impressed by this website. I recommend starting with this index page:

http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/educ...ket/short.html


You will probably want to be sure to have a look at this particular page:

http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/educ...et/flteqs.html

Our government has borrowed trillions of dollars to fund this website, so you should take advantage of it!

Yes indeed, there is a good collection of resources here (correction to the first URL):

http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/educ...et/shortr.html

I'm taking serious offense to the statement above about our government borrowing trillions of dollars to fund this website. NASA's total budget this year is on the order of $17 billion dollars. Since NASA's inception (< 50 years ago), it hasn't spent $1 trillion dollars. The current NASA budget funds a huge list of activities: returning the Space Shuttle to flight, starting the development of the new human spaceflight vehicle, operating the ISS, supporting the Mars missions - operating (2 of Dave Lavery's "other cars" and 3 orbiters) and two in development (Mars Science Lab and Phoenix), operating Cassini at Saturn, launching New Horizons Pluto mission (later this month), operating Stardust (returning Jan. 15 with cometary and interplanetary dust particles), operating 2 Voyager spacecraft (at the real "edge" of our solar system), operating Hubble Space Telescope (including the final Hubble repair mission), operating Spitzer (a large infrared space telescope), developing the Space Interferometer Mission, supporting aeronautics research, operating and developing many, many Earth Science missions, plus many other missions and research activities that wouldn't begin to fit on a whole page of this thread.

On top of all the research and mission support, the NASA budget is providing some support to educational activities (such as FIRST and the above referenced website). The NASA education budget is on the order of 1% of the total NASA budget (which in of itself is about 0.7% of the federal government's budget). The website above was probably developed by a small handful of dedicated people - true educators, with a tiny budget and, most unfortunately, not a totally secure job future. (NASA's budget is under tremendous pressure and scrutiny as the agency is in a period of transition - there have be many layoffs within the agency and with contractors that support NASA in the past year).

Sorry for the rant, but I suspect there's a lot of people with the misconception that NASA's budget is large (it's less than 5% of the Department of Defense budget). I think the public gets a lot for what it invests (not borrows) in NASA.