Here’s a new blog. It’s not that new, actually–I’ve been meaning to blogroll it for a while, but its proprieter went on vacation, so I decided to wait until he got back, so as to not send folks to stale and static content.

As we all know, many law professors have been blogging, but this is the first blog that I know of from an aerospace engineering professor. It’s Spacecraft by Professor Chris Hall, at Virginia Tech in (I assume) Blacksburg. Hopefully, this is a start of a trend, because it seems to me like an excellent way to communicate with the students, as well as the rest of the world.

He’s off to a good start, with this post about timeless aerospace design laws (somewhat like Augustine’s Laws, though the latter are more about aerospace policy than engineering per se). Like him, I like this one:

6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

He seems to specialize in spacecraft dynamics, orbital mechanics and general spacecraft design. A man (again, I assume, since the given name “Chris” isn’t gender specific) after my own heart (except I was more of a systems engineer than a designer, i.e., I was better at critiquing others’ designs than coming up with my own, other than in broad concept).

I had a lot of gripes about the aerospace engineering curriculum when I was in school, and I suspect that many of them still apply, so there may be some interesting back and forth in the future. Anyway, go check it out.