WHEN & WHERE: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:40 - 4 p.m., Hayes 213

TAUGHT BY: Professor of Physics Benjamin Schumacher

There’s a certain cachet that comes with saying that you’re taking a class on rocket science. After all, understanding concepts like aerodynamic drag, rocket propulsion and orbital mechanics is complicated stuff. But for students enrolled in PHYS 101 (“Rocket Science”), a general education class that’s become a popular staple of the spring semester for nonmajors, it’s all in a day’s work.

“The title is intimidating,” admitted Professor of Physics Benjamin Schumacher, who has been teaching the class since 2015. “But in the physics department, we teach a lot of courses that are aimed at every Kenyon student. They’re accessible to anybody. This was designed to be that kind of course.”

So, yes, the class gets knee-deep in the daunting science behind rocket propulsion and space flight. There are conversations about ballistic motion and conservation of energy, topics you might see in an introductory physics course. Students conduct lab experiments involving free fall and test rocket aerodynamics in a homemade wind tunnel.

But they do it all without calculus and other high-level math. “The point of the course is not to rely on anything that you can’t assume a Kenyon student has had in high school,” said Schumacher, who centers the course around a “Basic Rocket Science” text that he wrote explicitly for it and continually updates.

Along the way, students also learn the history of astronautics, starting about 100 years ago and covering everything from ballistic missile development to the first artificial satellites. They learn about the Space Race and the Apollo program as well as the space vehicles of today.

Schumacher — who has a doctorate in theoretical physics and is an expert in such complex topics as quantum mechanics, information theory and black hole physics — has taught at Kenyon since 1988. The biggest questions he likes to ask are the simple ones: “How much can I do? How far can I go?” 

As it turns out with this class, the answer is “pretty far” — including hundreds of feet up in the air. As the semester draws to a close, and with it the Kenyon careers of the many seniors who tend to gravitate to the class, students gather on the College’s athletic fields to launch the model rockets that they build and test as part of the class. “That’s really fun,” Schumacher said. “One of the last things they’re doing at Kenyon is flying their rockets.”

He continued: “This is something you might do with your Cub Scout troop, but we’re approaching it in a pretty sophisticated way — knowing about the aerodynamics, knowing about the engine performance, having actually computer-modeled the performance of the rocket design and being able to compare that to real data. … It’s hard stuff, but it’s worth it.”