Aerospace Sciences is the combination of aeronautical and astronautical sciences. Aeronautical sciences deal with the whole field of flight of vehicles within the Earth’s atmosphere, and astronautic sciences with the flight of vehicles in space, beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. As a certain degree of technology overlap between the two fields, aerospace often describes them both. Hence, aerospace engineering involves analyzing, designing, manufacturing, and using aircraft and/or spacecraft. It is a very diverse field with a multitude of commercial, industrial, and government applications.
Aerospace engineers use art (referring to those skills, or set of skills, acquired through study, observation, practice, and experience, or by intuitive capability or creative insight), science (referring to the laws of an organized body of knowledge, i.e., Laws of Physics: Thermodynamics, Newton’s, and Bernoulli), and natural resources to design and create valuable products, structures, or machines that benefit the aerospace industry.
One subtopic within the field of aerospace engineering is aerospace structures. Spacecrafts are beyond the scope of this book, and any method and procedure covered in this book focus on aircraft structures. The topic is one of the most challenging ones to cover for the diverse number of design and analysis aspects present.