> Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
Ridiculous, given that flight is entirely about swimming through the air, while space rocketry is mostly about how to get through and out of the atmosphere ASAP.
(Not to mention, rocketry as a field was already making better progress than flight back then.)
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
This is how we've always been learning, though. Even Leonardo and other early pioneers of flight constantly attempted things impossible at their level. It's those attempts that led to progress - the theory and methods to solve such problems on paper came about only in the century.
Incidentally, it also turned out that studying bird flight was a waste of time - bird flight is too complicated for us to replicate even these days, and we mostly don't bother, because simpler systems yield better results for the kind of needs we have now.
Ridiculous, given that flight is entirely about swimming through the air, while space rocketry is mostly about how to get through and out of the atmosphere ASAP.
(Not to mention, rocketry as a field was already making better progress than flight back then.)
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
This is how we've always been learning, though. Even Leonardo and other early pioneers of flight constantly attempted things impossible at their level. It's those attempts that led to progress - the theory and methods to solve such problems on paper came about only in the century.
Incidentally, it also turned out that studying bird flight was a waste of time - bird flight is too complicated for us to replicate even these days, and we mostly don't bother, because simpler systems yield better results for the kind of needs we have now.