The ROCKET SCIENCE FOR BABIES book is all wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but so wrong as to baffle the impressionable imagination of babies everywhere. I thought perhaps the author was just a little confused, and some errors slipped by the editors and fact checkers, but no, when I got to the conclusion page here, the absurdity reached new heights.
The first half of the book gives the usual primer on aircraft wings creating upward lift 90° to the direction of travel. Why is this in a rocket book I wondered? Then they did a bizarre transition from wings to the fins of a rocket, as if they were similar. Yes, fins also stick out of a metal tube, but they don’t function anything like wings on a plane. Maybe I was just misunderstanding their symbolism, but noooo… they end the book with this doozy:
“With lift and thrust, we can go to the moon!” No, no, no, this is so misleading to babies! There is no air in space; lift will not work outside the atmosphere. You can’t fly to the moon!
Notice how they still show the lift vector normal to the thrust vector. Even that is non-sensical as rockets have radial symmetry (the fins circle the center) so even if they were shaped to have lift (which they aren’t), there would be no net lift vector pointing “up”. If you put wings where the fins go, you would induce a spin, but no lift vector as with a plane. The fins are used for passive stabilization in air, and most modern rockets instead gimbal the engine(s) for thrust vectoring without fins. No wings or fins on the Lunar Module.
So, baby book people creating Instagramable-props for parents, please, for the love of babies, don’t peddle kindergarten bunk science as rocket science!
P.S. I wrote a little rocket-science-redux for WIRED a few years back, with a focus on the fins.
The confusing transition from wings to fins, like an evolutionary freak show:
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