Comment by dgoodell

I work at NASA. We had a big review meeting for a space brayton (turbine engine) concept. One manager-level engineer absolutely thought that the spinning rotor would apply a constant torque to the spacecraft that would have to be constantly counteracted. I tried and failed to explain conservation of angular momentum to him.

I studied physics and it always surprises me how many good engineers really don’t have a very good intuitive understanding of basic physics principles like conservation laws.