Fireworks, Rockets and Space Planes

The Chinese were very early on the rocket scene. They had a simple form of gunpowder which was put into bamboo shoots then thrown into fires. The resulting somewhat haphazard explosions were used mainly during religious and festive celebrations. These short firecracker tubes were later attached to arrows and long sticks, looking very much like our rocket fireworks today, and so the early rocket was born.

Sometime in 1232 AD was when the first use of true rockets occurred. The Chinese and Mongols were at it, and during the nasty battle of Kai-Keng the Chinese repelled the Mongol invaders with a barrage of "arrows of flying fire." Indeed all use of rockets from this time on were for wars or firework displays - there's a contrast!

Sir Isaac Newton gave the scientific reasons the explain why rockets work in the late 17th century. His third law of motion explains that every action has an opposite and equal reaction. For a rocket, the action is the thrust downward at lift-off and the reaction is the movement of the rocket upward.

In 1883 a Russian school master Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky began explaining the idea of how a rocket could fly in space and also made the first mention of artificial satellites. Later, his major achievement was to suggest certain liquids could be used as fuel for rockets. The benefits are that liquid fuel could be more easily controlled while also giving a greater thrust than solid fuel. His suggested fuel combination, written in 1903, was eventually used to send the Apollo astronauts to the Moon - how remarkably advanced Konstantin was. His ideas even included use of a multi-stage rockets to achieve the highest speeds possible, exactly as the Apollo Saturn V rockets did as well. Looking further ahead his thoughts even stretched to the development of Space Stations.

Konstantin never flew a rocket, but we know a man who did: Robert Goddard. In 1912 he fired a solid fuel rocket so very high in the sky which proved that rockets did not need the air in our atmosphere to 'push' against. Therefore, they would work ever so happily in the near-vacuum of space. Newton had already said this of course, but no one was listening.

After solid fuel experiments Goddard, like Tsiolkovsky, looked at liquid fuel and all its possibilities. No one had built, let alone flown a liquid fuel rocket before. It was a much harder task to build than a solid fuel rocket - you need fuel tanks, turbines and combustion chambers. Goddard overcame all the difficulties and on 16th March 1926 he achieved the first successful flight of a liquid fuel rocket. His rocket, launched from Auburn, Massachusetts USA, flew for two and a half seconds, climbed 12.5 metres, and landed 56 metres away in a cabbage patch! It's average speed during this short, but monumental, flight was 64 mph or 103 km/h. Rober Goddard made many more rockets, each one improving and growing larger with each successive design.

While Robert tinkered away in the United States, rocketry things were happening in Europe. A German physicist and mathematician Hermann Oberth, actually born in Transylvannia, published a small book called "The Rocket into Interplanetary Space" which detailed the principles of rocketry flight. His little book inspired several groups of rocket societies around the world including, in Germany, the Society for Space Travel, which eventually led to the building of the frightening V-2.

After World War II many German rocket scientists, together with plenty of unused rocket bits, went to the Soviet Union or the United States. Both countries developed many medium and long range intercontinental ballistic missiles from their expertise. It was these missiles that became the early rockets for the space programs of the late 1950's.

The Russian's led the way into space on 4th October 1957 when Sputnik 1 became the world's first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. This tiny man-made moon was a 58 cm (23 inches) diameter sphere of aluminium weighing 83.5 kg (184 lb). The first American satellite was Explorer 1, launched on 31st January 1958. Measuring just 15 cm (6 inches) in diameter, and weighing only 14 kg (31 lb), Explorer 1 was much smaller than its Soviet counterpart.

Rockets developed dramatically over the next ten years as the Space Race entered full swing. In America the relatively small 83 ft-long (25 m) Mercury Redstone eventually made way for the largest rocket ever made: the 364 ft (111 m) American Saturn V launcher (both rockets pictured in the right column). The majority of this enormous craft was used as fuel tanks, and it used a LOT of fuel. The main five engines had a combined thrust of 40 jumbo jets, which used 3 tonnes of fuel every second. The temperature of all this lot reached a balmy 3000 degrees Celsius!

Certain spacecraft are not happy with using just one type of fuel, such as the well-known Space Shuttle, which uses a combination of liquid AND solid fuel rockets.

© Anton Vamplew 2008