Astrodynamics Textbooks on My Shelf
gereshes.comTrue story: when I was fifteen, I went on a school field trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and picked up a copy of BMW in the museum bookstore. I was determined that I was going to make it out of my podunk little town and become an aerospace engineer, so I decided to work through the book on my own.
The problem was that I had never had calculus, much less differential equations. I fact I didn't know what calculus was; I only knew it as a word that meant "really hard math". So I made it about five pages in and realized that I had no chance. BMW stayed on my bookshelf.
Ten years later, I was in a graduate program for aerospace engineering and had finally made it through all the pre-recs for 600-level astrodynamics. BMW was one of the textbooks for the course. The moment, a month into that class, when I opened the book and it actually made sense was one of the highlights of my life, and that copy of the book I bought as a teenager is one of my most prized possessions.
Great story. Reminds me of the book and movie October Sky, in which the protagonists, who are high school students, strive to learn calculus so that they can learn how to better build rockets.
Congratulations on sticking with it despite the early hurdle.
I’ve always wanted a curated list of textbooks from people who actually read them in depth.
I’ve read through a couple textbooks front-to-back on topics that are completely unrelated to my field[0]. A good textbook should be able to explain tough concepts while engaging the reader with interesting content and relation to the world.
0: I quite enjoyed Anthony J.F. Griffiths et al’s Introduction to Genetic Analysis, despite never taking a genetics or even biology class.
Absolutely agree. I always saw textbooks as a thing I had to read or a place to find the homework problems, not a place to learn.
Then I had a professor who had an accent I struggled to understand. Thankfully, she picked a fantastic Linear Algebra textbook. That's when I realized that the textbook is debatably the most important part of a class (at least for math and science).
Old math teacher would put homewoek assignment on board at start of day.
So I would just solve it during class. Teaching myself from the book.
One day assignment wasn’t on board. So I asked her for it so I could do it during class.
She was confused and asked me how I was going to learn the material if I wasn’t paying attention.
Well it turns out people get really upset when you logically explain how you don’t need them since the book teaches it just fine.
Peter Smith's guide to logic textbooks is the gold standard here.
Something like that: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...
That collection of posts/comments is highly misleading.
Better just to search for the subject on reddit.
Picking one entry at random: ordinary differential equations. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...
The corresponding reddit search: https://old.reddit.com/search?q=ordinary+differential+equati...
Draw your own conclusions. From any source, that's what you'll have to do in the end. In this sample, it happens I've skimmed the lesswrong thread's recommended book and thought it looked much more interesting than the text I learned from years before (Boyce & diPrima). The reddit thread seems pretty barren in glancing through the results summary.
Any particular subjects you are interested in?
Showing my age: As an undergrad, in 1969, I read Dirk Brouwer's book, Methods of Celestial Mechanics; much of it over my head. I remember writing a Fortran program to solve Kepler's Equation and -- surprise -- getting the same answer as the textbook's analytic solution.
Turned out to be really useful when I studied planetary science in grad school - just knowing the language of the coordinate systems and expansions.
Later, I picked up a copy of Mattias Soop's sweet monograph, "Introduction to Geostationary Orbits" ... even today, it's a joy to read.BMW is a fun one! It is definitely meant for Air Force cadets in the early 70s (and the introduction says as much) so it's pretty approachable with a college freshman physics and calc background. The final "homework problem" is to stitch together the radar ranging, orbit determination, Lambert problem solving, and rocket guidance assignments from the previous chapters into a complete ICBM defense system. Pretty wild. And I think most of the code examples are in assembly.
As the author mentions, you can pick up a copy for well under $20. I'd say it's worth it for the 1960s-style diagrams and figures alone!
> As the author mentions, you can pick up a copy for well under $20.
It's a Dover edition. They love getting textbooks that are decades old and making inexpensive but decent quality paperback editions. In fast moving fields Dover editions may be out of date, but if the fundamentals haven't changed much a Dover book can be a great way to get started.
To a good first approximation if you are interested in some area of STEM and would be fine with an approach that doesn't include the last couple of decades are so of developments Dover is a good place to start.
BMW is a classic from my time at USAFA. It's a great book and ideal for those beginning in Astrodynamics.
I bought it from an upperclassman for 25 cents.
Still on my shelf and I used it to design my own astrodynamics course to teach during grad school.
I found BMW when I was in college and found it eminently readable. One reason is that I had previously read Arthur Clarke's Interplanetary Flight, and the other reason is the delightful historical background that BMW sprinkled throughout the book. I am not an aerospace engineer by training or by trade, but it was always my dream.
Ordered, and just in time for my finishing Ignition. Might as well harness the current interest to learn some new math. :)
It is still a work in progress, but Dmitry Savransky of Cornell is working on an interactive astrodynamics textbook using Jupyter notebooks. Link here: https://github.com/dsavransky/astrodynamicsbook
I have a different opinion about Curtis - I think it presents the topics in a uniquely understandable way, and is a very valuable book for learning undergraduate-level astrodynamics.
> I’d say if you’re starting out, go with BMW, and if you want to get more advanced, go with Schaub and Junkins
I'd replace BMW with Curtis here.
Does anyone know of a good way of searching textbooks? Sort of a search engine where I can type in "astrodynamics" and a list like this would be returned.
The Open Syllabus Explorer? https://opensyllabus.org/
The search results for "astrodynamics" [1] include several of ht ebooks listed above; clicking on the entry for Bate shows the co-assigned books, which inlcudes all of them.
[1]: https://opensyllabus.org/results-list/titles?size=50&findWor...
[2]: https://opensyllabus.org/result/title?id=55740085568884
Many universities/professors publicly post syllabi, so if you're willing to dig through course catalogs you can see what books universities are using for related classes.
I use Amazon search for that. I’ve found some great books that way