Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics (Dover Books on Aeronautical Engineering)

Its great

This book spends some time on nomenclature and vectors, focusing on aspects that will help dramatically simplify later material. Overall, the approach to attitude dynamics is elegant and immediately useful, enabling one have an excellent depth of understanding to solve attitude problems creatively. And at this price, it's an impulse buy.I would recommend also Kane's Spacecraft Dynamics as a mathematically intense counterpart, though that's now hard to find.

Often ignored, the ability to control just where a spacecraft is pointed is absolutely critical to space flight. Without such controls, the Hubble telescope doesn't point in the right direction. The spy satellites don't point at the ground and the re-entry rockets don't point you in the right direction to come home.The first Explorer and Sputnik experiences proved that what we thought we knew about the classical analysis of Newton and others were wrong, or at least incomplete. The realities of space flight intruded into the carefully developed mathematics of classical mechanics.This book reflects the lessons learned and gives a rigorous mathematical introduction to the dynamics of spacecraft control. This is an augmented reprint of the original edition published in 1986.

This book is a really nice tool for those who are learning about spacecraft attitude dynamics

This is the second densest book I've ever read (winner is "Fundamentals of Vibrations"). It was not helpful for completing my classwork. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of texts which explain the energy and momentum ellipsoid concept in detail, so I'm still looking for a replacement.I have it on good authority that Vectrixes are a good thing, but I'm having trouble getting the concept out of this book.