#322 overall
Aeronautics and Astronautics
MIT OpenCourseWare
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2018–2020 · score 1.5
MIT OpenCourseWare's Aeronautics and Astronautics department collection of free course materials covering aerospace topics, including aircraft systems engineering. Commenters point to specific courses within it, such as one on the Space Shuttle design.
Commenters point to it as a source of introductory aerospace material and to a specific engineering course on the Space Shuttle's design.
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20062026
I have no experience here, but starting from physics sounds like a very difficult approach since the equations that govern aerodynamics aren't that simple. So I would look for some results that simplify these equations. Like how Maxwell's equations aren't used for designing most electronic circuits, but instead people use simplifications like circuit theory. I suspect a similar simplifying approach would exist in aerospace design (but again I have no experience here). Perhaps the best idea is to take some introductory courses here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/
Though you are not wrong in details, reality is a bit more complicated than that. The STS (shuttle) was pretty well engineered for the politically-driven requirements it had, and if not for the stupid don't-upgrade-human-rated-design mentality of space operations at NASA post-Challenger, it could have been iterated towards a cost effective solution (e.g. $150M per launch, 90's money). There were plans in place for this--flyback boosters instead of ocean recovery with impact and salt water damage; cross-fed H2/LOX boosters instead of explosion-prone SRBs; insulation-less external tank design; non-crewed variants with more payload to orbit; v2 of the main engine that would have required less refurbishment; etc. They just all got scrapped. Shuttle got expensive because of a bunch of unforeseen stuff that could have been fixed but they decided to work around instead.
For a look at the design itself and how remarkably shuttle achieved its goals, I'd suggest the MIT engineering course that covered it[0]. Also look at Shuttle-C[1] or Magnum[2] for an idea of how things could have gone.
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-C [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_(rocket)