Rocket Science

The Physics and Engineering of Spaceflight

Propulsion, Orbital Mechanics, Vehicle Design, and How Humanity Leaves the Planet

DataField.Dev

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

First edition · 2026

Free and open under the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Code samples in the code/ directories and the astrotools package are additionally released under the MIT License.

Built as two editions from a single Markdown source: a readable web and print edition (mdBook) and an interactive edition with runnable Python (Jupyter Book). A single-file reading edition, rocket-science-complete.md, is also provided.

Part of the DataField open-textbook series. Companion volumes — Calculus, Physics, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations — are described in Prerequisites.