The maths that made Voyager possible

A quote: "Undeterred by the fact that some of the finest minds in history, including Isaac Newton hadn't solved the three-body problem, Minovitch became focused on cracking it."<p>This is misleading. The three-body problem is known to be insoluble in closed form, but anyone cam model it numerically. The person being describes was one of the first to do this, but the comparison with Newton is misleading.<p>Many kinds of problems are soluble through numerical modeling that aren't remotely soluble in closed form, and it is important to distinguish between the two kinds of solution.<p>On reading the article, it occurs to me that the author simply doesn't understand the math well enough to grasp the difference between an analytical and a numerical solution.

My biggest take away was that, and I can't believe I didn't know this already, the Voyager probes relied on once-in-a-couple-centuries planetary alignments. I wonder how long until propulsion technologies make that irrelevant.

There is more information on Michael Minovitch's website:<p><a href="http://www.gravityassist.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gravityassist.com/</a><p>He sounds rather bitter that his story has not made him more famous, and comes off as something of a crank at that ("How Did Minovitch Discover (Create) His New Theory Of Space Travel?"). I think Minovitch is basically an engineer at heart, and is resentful that all of the attention seems to go to the scientists, i.e. people who come up with the actual physical theories about mass and energy and so forth.<p>Our culture does value scientists more than engineers. You could argue that this is good because theories are universally applicable and represent fundamental understanding, or that this is bad because many theories have absolutely no applications and that it's the engineers who deliver value to society. You could also argue that the amount of prestige that we heap on scientists tends to go to their heads and they stop doing good work. But whatever. Stay sharp, do what you're best at, and don't pay attention to other people's benefits packages.

I had no idea before reading this article that it was hard to escape from the attraction of the sun! It makes me wonder if we now have the capabilities to build a rocket that can do it without the help of the attraction of the outer planets.<p>Does somebody here who's knowledgeable on the subject have some reference?

I always wondered why would you send a probe around a planet... It seemed dumb. But it seems that the probe would steal some energy from the planet's speed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist</a>

I was expecting something more like this: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Golay_code" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Golay_code</a>

unrelated to the article, sorry for hijacking but I'm very curios why people like SparrowOS post things like that?<p>What do they have to gain from it?