Astrodynamics Textbooks on My Shelf (opens in new tab)

True story: when I was fifteen, I went on a school field trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and picked up a copy of BMW in the museum bookstore. I was determined that I was going to make it out of my podunk little town and become an aerospace engineer, so I decided to work through the book on my own.

The problem was that I had never had calculus, much less differential equations. I fact I didn't know what calculus was; I only knew it as a word that meant "really hard math". So I made it about five pages in and realized that I had no chance. BMW stayed on my bookshelf.

Ten years later, I was in a graduate program for aerospace engineering and had finally made it through all the pre-recs for 600-level astrodynamics. BMW was one of the textbooks for the course. The moment, a month into that class, when I opened the book and it actually made sense was one of the highlights of my life, and that copy of the book I bought as a teenager is one of my most prized possessions.

I’ve always wanted a curated list of textbooks from people who actually read them in depth.

I’ve read through a couple textbooks front-to-back on topics that are completely unrelated to my field[0]. A good textbook should be able to explain tough concepts while engaging the reader with interesting content and relation to the world.

0: I quite enjoyed Anthony J.F. Griffiths et al’s Introduction to Genetic Analysis, despite never taking a genetics or even biology class.

Showing my age: As an undergrad, in 1969, I read Dirk Brouwer's book, Methods of Celestial Mechanics; much of it over my head. I remember writing a Fortran program to solve Kepler's Equation and -- surprise -- getting the same answer as the textbook's analytic solution.

  Turned out to be really useful when I studied planetary science in grad school - just knowing the language of the coordinate systems and expansions.  

  Later, I picked up a copy of Mattias Soop's sweet monograph, "Introduction to Geostationary Orbits" ... even today, it's a joy to read.

BMW is a fun one! It is definitely meant for Air Force cadets in the early 70s (and the introduction says as much) so it's pretty approachable with a college freshman physics and calc background. The final "homework problem" is to stitch together the radar ranging, orbit determination, Lambert problem solving, and rocket guidance assignments from the previous chapters into a complete ICBM defense system. Pretty wild. And I think most of the code examples are in assembly.

As the author mentions, you can pick up a copy for well under $20. I'd say it's worth it for the 1960s-style diagrams and figures alone!

It is still a work in progress, but Dmitry Savransky of Cornell is working on an interactive astrodynamics textbook using Jupyter notebooks. Link here: https://github.com/dsavransky/astrodynamicsbook

I have a different opinion about Curtis - I think it presents the topics in a uniquely understandable way, and is a very valuable book for learning undergraduate-level astrodynamics.

> I’d say if you’re starting out, go with BMW, and if you want to get more advanced, go with Schaub and Junkins

I'd replace BMW with Curtis here.

Does anyone know of a good way of searching textbooks? Sort of a search engine where I can type in "astrodynamics" and a list like this would be returned.