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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An extended rocket alignment analogy, published by remember on August 13, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. This work was done while at Conjecture. This post has been written for the first Refine blog post day, at the end of the week of readings, discussions, and exercises about epistemology for doing good conceptual research. Thanks for comments by Linda Linsefors, Paul Bricman, and Adam Shimi. Introduction The Rocket Alignment Problem presents a fun scenario trying to explain why understanding part of the theoretical basis for a problem might be useful. If we were trying to get to the moon for the first time, understanding Newtonian mechanics would indeed be quite useful! As would astrodynamics in general, which was really developed starting with Herrick in the 1930s. But not sufficient: there were a whole host of other problems that needed to be solved, many of which were at least as difficult as theoretical understanding. At a minimum, we needed to develop rocket fuel, the materials that could survive high temperatures from fuel and reentry, enough understanding of the materials to create models of the rocket themselves and the stress and heat individual parts were under, communication devices so we knew what our rockets were doing, and more. I’ll look at the first two in more detail here then step back and look at the problem as a whole at different points in time. Beyond simply pointing out the rocket alignment problem to show how messy it truly was, pushing deeper into the analogy may let us see what we have developed, and what we expect we need to develop. Rocket Fuels and the Rocket Body Developing rocket fuel powerful enough to lift the rocket but stable enough that it didn’t just immediately explode required quite a bit of chemistry, engineering, and ridiculously dangerous trials. Consideration of this problem directly applied to rocketry, building off of the chemical achievements of the previous century, started in the early 1900s and continued through the development of the rocket program. A Russian school teacher, Tsiolkovsky, first proposed using liquid fuels, such as liquid hydrogen, paired with liquid oxygen for the oxidizer, recognizing that standard fuels or gunpowder didn’t provide enough energy. He was mostly not noticed, and Goddard’s work on building liquid fuel powered rockets was mostly ignored as well. In the late 20s and 30s, more mainstream efforts pick up across Europe, using both new liquid fuels and oxidizers such as nitrogen tetrooxide or tetranitromethane,, the latter which had a tendency to blow up and take off a few fingers with it. More unstable still were monopropellants, which contained both fuel and the oxidizer in the same molecule and would react with themselves with the right catalyst or temperature, but if they have enough energy to compete with standard propellants, had the unnerving tendency to randomly blow up, which led to them mostly being abandoned. These humble beginnings led to a long and generally productive investigation into fuels that were powerful enough to propel a rocket to space, but not unstable enough to propel various bits of the rocket across the launch pad. This whole process required both theoretical knowledge of chemistry to help guide the search process, and tinkering with fuels and oxidizers to see what worked, with various tangents such as looking at monopropellants not really panning out. Creating a rocket that could survive this was equally difficult. The range of temperatures that specific parts were expected to be under was extreme, from -250F (-155 C) to 3,000F (1,650C). They had other requirements they needed to meet as well: “It was necessary to design thousands of these tiles that had compound curves, interfaced with thermal barriers and hatches, and had penetrations for instrumentation and st...