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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
I cant drive my car more than 2 miles in the summer without hitting insects on the windshield and front grill (esp after I wash it). How can you blast a rocket through 60 miles of atmosphere without hitting something on the way up?
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That reminds me of what one of my aero professors told us about the trouble the Germans went through to keep the wings of their planes clean and insect free during WWII. To keept the wings as efficient as possible, they'd polish and wax them on the ground, put a paper sleeve around the wing, and have a resistance wire on the leading edge to burn it free when they'd reached the "bug free" altitude. However, we developed the laminar flow airfoil, put it on the P-51, and the rest is history.