if a planet falls in the void

Lithobraking, therefore, is coined by analogy, with “litho-” being the greek root for “stone”. It’s how you slow your spaceship down… by crashing it into the fucking ground. 

So a crashed rocket “executed a lithobraking maneuver”.

There’s also “Engine rich exhaust”, which is what happens when your rocket engine starts breaking apart and bits of machinery are burning along with the fuel that’s supposed to be burning. 

A more technical term is “Negative periapsis”. Orbits have a periapsis and an apoapsis, the lowest and highest altitude they reach each orbit. A negative periapsis, therefore, is a negative altitude. Your rocket hit the ground. 

Imagine evolving capsaicin specifically to stop mammals from eating your fruits, and then a mammal comes along that not only will eat your fruits, but likes them specifically because of the capsaicin, so much that it starts using its weird paws to distribute and care for your seeds, which turns into a strong selective force that literally starts evolving you into producing MORE capsaicin and makes you a WAY more successful and wider ranged species than you ever were before

Instead of, I don't know, EVOLVING TO BE FASTER, this animal finds a faster animal and sits on it. Which shouldn't even work because the faster animal is a prey animal and this animal is a predator, but SOMEHOW they FORM A SOCIAL BOND WITH THE PREY. So they can sit on it while it runs fast. And somehow the prey animal?? is cool with this?? and benefits from this relationship???

eat poison plants, decide they like getting poisoned, and evolve the plants to poison them more

evolve to not have hair, but they find mammals with thick fluffy hair and put the hair on themselves, and evolve the mammals to produce extra hair so they can both have a warm coat of hair

split up their parasitic lice species into two separate species because they start taking other animals' hair and putting it on themselves so much

learn how to set things on fire on purpose. maintain body temperature by just standing beside some wood that's on fire instead of literally any normal option

figure out that their prey tastes better and is easier to digest when they hold it over a fire after killing it. get smarter because they digest food so good after it's been held over a fire.

find a poisonous plant and try washing it in boiling water until they don't die when they eat it anymore

go across the ocean by making a floating nest despite not being able to breathe underwater, drink ocean water, or even swim naturally

drink milk from other mammals even though they can't digest it and it makes them sick. Evolve those mammals to produce more milk than their babies can drink so they can drink the milk. Some members of the species evolve to be able to digest milk because they were so hellbent on drinking it.

find flowers, bugs and minerals that are nice colors and crush them up to try to turn other things that color

It may have a dark red spot not shown in those models due to changes in its reflection.

I wouldn't recommend it though:

One reason is that the rocket scientists don’t pose much of a threat to management. There’s more of them than there are jobs available building rockets. If they quit, then the bosses will just hire slightly dumber rocket scientists, and pay them even less. Rockets will still go up, and they’ll go where they want to, because of the well-documented history and best practices of the industry. They can keep coasting on this for a little while, maybe even decades, with a barely-perceptible drop in quality. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe tomorrow is when we find out what the first part of a rocket that has been quality-faded into oblivion is. Hope you don’t live under the flight path.

There is, of course, another approach, and that’s “being a dirtbag.” I myself have a lot of experience in this particular field, and I think it is one of those multi-skilled disciplines that can expand into rocket science if so required. The aforementioned best practices of this industry have been written down and documented so well, in fact, that just some asshole off the street like myself can check them out of the library (using an assumed name, of course,) read them, and know generally all that humanity has figured out over the last century about making rockets that don’t explode. Then, in the language of Silicon Valley influencers, I can “disrupt” the industry.