It's not Rocket Science

[Kilroywashere]

I get really, really annoyed by this phrase.
Rocket science is the most simple thing, probably simpler than 99% of the things people compare to it.
Take a rocket, push something out the back, the rocket moves forward. That's all there is to it. It was formally described by Isaac Newton in 1687, so it's not exactly cutting edge...

@Copernicus321 And I got hooked as a small child when my father read out from the paper about Sputnik One in 1957. I remember few things from when I was that small, but I remember that.
So rocket science is simple. As simple as lauching a sailing boat from Europe and discovering the Americas. Takes some planning to survive the journey and get there and back, but setting off - no problem.
The engineering, the planning, the scheduling etc. really complicated. But the principle is simple.
What we have here is a difference of semantics. No problem for me. I'll go on being annoyed and appreciate the difference in viewpoint.

That would be a leap! Poor Sam, he never got home.
Surely engineering is the application of aspects of science, much of which is underpinned by mathematics.

@Kilroywashere

As you said, way upthread Scientists research the principles of motion, properties of materials, the atmosphere etc.

One of the joint discoverers of Lunar Mascons was an aerospace engineer who asked the question why weren’t spacecraft in Lunar Orbit behaving in the way the science (as known at that point) predicted….so I still think you are trying to draw a hard distinction where there isn’t one..

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milford_Muller