History of rockets

See also: Timeline of rocket and missile technology

A depiction of the "long serpent" rocket launcher from the 11th century book Wujing Zongyao. The holes in the frame are designed to keep the fire arrows separate.

The first gunpowder-powered rockets were developed in Song China, by the 13th century. The technology spread throughout the Old World in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the mid-13th century. Medieval and early modern rockets were used militarily as incendiary weapons in sieges.

The first iron-cased rockets were developed in the late 18th century in the Kingdom of Mysore, adopted and improved as the Congreve rocket and used in the Napoleonic Wars. Use of liquid propellants instead of gunpowder greatly improved the effectiveness of rocket artillery in World War II, and opened up the possibility of manned spaceflight after 1945.

Medieval history

The first rocket was called a fire arrow [citation needed]. The Chinese rockets were powered by gunpowder. They are used for fights against Mongols, warfare, and celebrations. At first they used to be in the form of fireworks.

The discovery of gunpowder was probably the product of centuries of alchemical experimentation in which Taoist alchemists in China were trying to create an elixir of immortality that would allow the person ingesting it to become physically immortal. However, anyone with a wood fire might have observed the acceleration of combustion that accidentally-chosen saltpetre-containing rocks would have produced.

The first rockets were developed in Song China, by the 13th century. An uncertain early use of rockets may date to 1232. There were reports of fire arrows and 'iron pots' that could be heard for 5 leagues (25 km, or 15 miles) when they exploded upon impact, causing devastation for a radius of 600 meters (2,000 feet), apparently due to shrapnel. The lowering of the iron pots may have been a way for a besieged army to blow up invaders. The problem is that the Chinese term "fire arrow" (火箭) may refer to either arrows with explosives attached, or to arrows propelled by gunpowder, such as the Korean Hwacha.

Somewhat more certain is the reference to the use of internal-combustion rocket propulsion in 1264, recording that the 'ground-rat,' a type of firework, had frightened the Empress-Mother Kung Sheng at a feast held in her honor by her son the Emperor Lizong.

Subsequently, one of the earliest texts to mention the use of rockets was the Huolongjing, written by the Chinese artillery officer Jiao Yu in the mid-14th century. This text also mentioned the use of the first known multistage rocket, the 'fire-dragon issuing from the water' (huo long chu shui), used mostly by the Chinese navy. Frank H. Winter proposed in The Proceedings of the Twentieth and Twenty-First History Symposia of the International Academy of Astronautics that southern China and the Laotian community rocket festivals might have been key in the subsequent spread of rocketry in the Orient.

Spread of rocket technology

Ryusei Festival at Yoshida town, Chichibu city, Saitama, Japan

The Chinese fire arrow was adopted by the Mongols by conquest of the northern part of China and by the subsequent employment of Chinese rocketry experts as mercenaries for the Mongol military, and the invention was spread via the Mongol invasions the Near East and Europe in the mid 13th century. Reports of the Battle of Mohi in the year 1241 describe the use of rocket-like weapons by the Mongols against the Magyars. The technology also spread to Korea by the 15th century, in the form of the hwacha wheeled cart, which was used as a platform to launch singijeon fire arrows.

Between 1270 and 1280, Hasan al-Rammah wrote al-furusiyyah wa al-manasib al-harbiyya (The Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices), which included 107 gunpowder recipes, 22 of which are for rockets. According to Ahmad Y Hassan, al-Rammah's recipes were more explosive than rockets used in China at the time. The terminology used by al-Rammah indicated a Chinese origin for the gunpowder weapons he wrote about, such as rockets and fire lances. Ibn al-Baytar, an Arab from Spain who had immigrated to Egypt, gave the name "snow of China" (Arabic: ثلج الصين‎‎ thalj al-ṣīn) to describe saltpetre. Al-Baytar died in 1248. The earlier Arab historians call saltpeter "Chinese snow" and " Chinese salt;" The Arabs also used the name "Chinese arrows" to refer to rockets. The Arabs attached "Chinese" to various names for gunpowder related objects. "Chinese flowers" was the name for fireworks, while "Chinese Snow" was given to saltpeter and "Chinese arrows" to rockets. While saltpeter was called "Chinese Snow" by Arabs, it was called "Chinese salt" (Persian: نمک چینی‎‎ namak-i čīnī) by the Iranians, or "salt from the Chinese marshes" (namak shūra chīnī Persian: نمک شوره چيني‎‎).

Depiction of a rocket in Kyeser's Bellifortis (1405)

Roger Bacon made one of the earliest mentions of gunpowder in Europe in 1267, in his work Epistola de secretis operibus artiis et naturae. His studies of gunpowder greatly improved the range of rockets. Bacon has been credited by some authors as the inventor of gunpowder (although the first to use it were Chinese), because around 1261 he developed the correct formula for gunpowder (75% of saltpeter, 15% of carbon and 10% of sulphur). Jean Froissart had the idea of launching rockets through tubes, so that they could make more accurate flights. Froissart's idea is a forerunner of the modern bazooka.

Adoption in Renaissance-era Europe

According to the 18th-century historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, rockets were used in the war between the Republics of Genoa and Venice at Chiozza in 1380. It is uncertain whether Muratori was correct in his interpretation, as the reference might also have been to bombard, but Muratori is the source for the widespread claim that the earliest recorded European use of rocket artillery dates to 1380. Konrad Kyeser described rockets in his famous military treatise Bellifortis around 1405. Kyeser describes three types of rockets, swimming, free flying and captive.

Joanes de Fontana in Bellicorum instrumentorum liber (c. 1420) described flying rockets in the shape of doves, running rockets in the shape of hares, and a large car driven by three rockets, as well as a large rocket torpedo with the head of a sea monster.

In the mid-16th century, Conrad Haas wrote a book that described rocket technology that combined fireworks and weapons technologies. This manuscript was discovered in 1961, in the Sibiu public records (Sibiu public records Varia II 374). His work dealt with the theory of motion of multi-stage rockets, different fuel mixtures using liquid fuel, and introduced delta-shape fins and bell-shaped nozzles.

The name Rocket comes from the Italian rocchetta, meaning "bobbin" or "little spindle", given due to the similarity in shape to the bobbin or spool used to hold the thread to be fed to a spinning wheel. The Italian term was adopted into German in the mid 16th century, by Leonhard Fronsperger in a book on rocket artillery published in 1557, using the spelling rogete, and by Conrad Haas as rackette; adoption into English dates to ca. 1610. Johann Schmidlap, a German fireworks maker, is believed to have experimented with staging in 1590.

Early modern history

Lagari Hasan Çelebi was a legendary Ottoman aviator who, according to an account written by Evliya Çelebi, made a successful manned rocket flight. Evliya Çelebi purported that in 1633 Lagari Hasan Çelebi launched in a 7-winged rocket using 50 okka (140 lbs) of gunpowder from Sarayburnu, the point below Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.

Lagâri Hasan Çelebi's rocket flight depicted in a 17th-century engraving

Siemienowicz

"Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima" ("Great Art of Artillery, the First Part", also known as "The Complete Art of Artillery"), first printed in Amsterdam in 1650, was translated to French in 1651, German in 1676, English and Dutch in 1729 and Polish in 1963. For over two centuries, this work of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth nobleman Kazimierz Siemienowicz was used in Europe as a basic artillery manual. The book provided the standard designs for creating rockets, fireballs, and other pyrotechnic devices. It contained a large chapter on caliber, construction, production and properties of rockets (for both military and civil purposes), including multi-stage rockets, batteries of rockets, and rockets with delta wing stabilizers (instead of the common guiding rods).

Mysorean rockets

Main article: Mysorean rockets

In 1792, the first iron-cased rockets were successfully developed and used by Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, rulers of the Kingdom of Mysore in India against the larger British East India Company forces during the Anglo-Mysore Wars. The British then took an active interest in the technology and developed it further during the 19th century. The Mysore rockets of this period were much more advanced than the British had previously seen, chiefly because of the use of iron tubes for holding the propellant; this enabled higher thrust and longer range for the missile (up to 2 km range). After Tipu's eventual defeat in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and the capture of the Mysore iron rockets, they were influential in British rocket development, inspiring the Congreve rocket, which was soon put into use in the Napoleonic Wars.

19th-century gunpowder rocket artillery

The Congreve rocket

William Congreve, son of the Comptroller of the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, London, became a major figure in the field. From 1801, Congreve researched on the original design of Mysore rockets and set on a vigorous development program at the Arsenal's laboratory. Congreve prepared a new propellant mixture, and developed a rocket motor with a strong iron tube with conical nose. This early Congreve rocket weighed about 32 pounds (14.5 kilograms). The Royal Arsenal's first demonstration of solid fuel rockets was in 1805. The rockets were effectively used during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Congreve published three books on rocketry.

From there, the use of military rockets spread throughout the western world. At the Battle of Baltimore in 1814, the rockets fired on Fort McHenry by the rocket vessel HMS Erebus were the source of the rockets' red glare described by Francis Scott Key in The Star-Spangled Banner. Rockets were also used in the Battle of Waterloo.

Early rockets were very inaccurate. Without the use of spinning or any controlling feedback loop, rockets had a strong tendency to veer sharply off of their intended course. The early Mysorean rockets and their successor British Congreve rockets reduced this somewhat by attaching a long stick to the end of a rocket (similar to modern bottle rockets) to make it harder for the rocket to change course. The largest of the Congreve rockets was the 32-pound (14.5 kg) Carcass, which had a 15-foot (4.6 m) stick. Originally, sticks were mounted on the side, but this was later changed to mounting in the center of the rocket, reducing drag and enabling the rocket to be more accurately fired from a segment of pipe.

In 1815, Alexander Dmitrievich Zasyadko began his work on creating military gunpowder rockets. He constructed rocket-launching platforms, which allowed rockets to be fired in salvos (6 rockets at a time), and gun-laying devices. Zasyadko elaborated a tactic for military use of rocket weaponry. In 1820, Zasyadko was appointed head of the Petersburg Armory, Okhtensky Powder Factory, pyrotechnic laboratory and the first Highest Artillery School in Russia. He organized rocket production in a special rocket workshop and created the first rocket sub-unit in the Russian army.

Artillery captain Józef Bem of the Kingdom of Poland started experiments with what was then called in Polish raca kongrewska. These culminated in his 1819 report Notes sur les fusees incendiares (German edition: Erfahrungen über die Congrevischen Brand-Raketen bis zum Jahre 1819 in der Königlischen Polnischen Artillerie gesammelt, Weimar 1820). The research took place in the Warsaw Arsenal, where captain Józef Kosiński also developed the multiple-rocket launchers adapted from horse artillery gun carriage. The 1st Rocketeer Corps was formed in 1822, it first saw combat during the Polish–Russian War 1830–31.

The accuracy problem was greatly improved in 1844 when William Hale modified the rocket design so that thrust was slightly vectored, causing the rocket to spin along its axis of travel like a bullet. The Hale rocket removed the need for a rocket stick, travelled further due to reduced air resistance, and was far more accurate.

In 1865 the British Colonel Edward Mounier Boxer built an improved version of the Congreve rocket placing two rockets in one tube, one behind the other.

Early 20th-century rocket pioneers

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published the first work on space travel, which was inspired by the writings of Jules Verne

At the beginning of the 20th Century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, largely driven by the inspiration of fiction by writers such as Jules Verne and H.G.Wells. Scientists seized on the rocket as a technology that was able to achieve this in real life, a possibility first recognized in 1861 by William Leitch.

In 1903, high school mathematics teacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), published Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами (The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices), the first serious scientific work on space travel. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation—the principle that governs rocket propulsion—is named in his honor (although it had been discovered previously). He also advocated the use of liquid hydrogen and oxygen for propellant, calculating their maximum exhaust velocity. His work was essentially unknown outside the Soviet Union, but inside the country it inspired further research, experimentation and the formation of the Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel in 1924.

In 1912, Robert Esnault-Pelterie published a lecture on rocket theory and interplanetary travel. He independently derived Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, did basic calculations about the energy required to make round trips to the Moon and planets, and he proposed the use of atomic power (i.e. radium) to power a jet drive.

Robert Goddard

In 1912 Robert Goddard, inspired from an early age by H.G. Wells, began a serious analysis of rockets, concluding that conventional solid-fuel rockets needed to be improved in three ways. First, fuel should be burned in a small combustion chamber, instead of building the entire propellant container to withstand the high pressures. Second, rockets could be arranged in stages. Finally, the exhaust speed (and thus the efficiency) could be greatly increased to beyond the speed of sound by using a De Laval nozzle. He patented these concepts in 1914. He also independently developed the mathematics of rocket flight.

In 1920, Goddard published these ideas and experimental results in A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. The work included remarks about sending a solid-fuel rocket to the Moon, which attracted worldwide attention and was both praised and ridiculed. A New York Times editorial suggested:

"That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."   —New York Times, 13 January 1920

In 1923, Hermann Oberth (1894–1989) published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("The Rocket into Planetary Space"), a version of his doctoral thesis, after the University of Munich had rejected it.

In 1924, Tsiolkovsky also wrote about multi-stage rockets, in 'Cosmic Rocket Trains'.

Modern rocketry

Pre-World War II

Robert Goddard and the first liquid-fueled rocket.

Modern rockets originated when Goddard attached a supersonic (de Laval) nozzle to the combustion chamber of a liquid-fueled rocket engine. These nozzles turn the hot gas from the combustion chamber into a cooler, hypersonic, highly directed jet of gas, more than doubling the thrust and raising the engine efficiency from 2% to 64%. On 16 March 1926 Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

During the 1920s, a number of rocket research organizations appeared worldwide. In 1927 the German car manufacturer Opel began to research rocket vehicles together with Mark Valier and the solid-fuel rocket builder Friedrich Wilhelm Sander. In 1928, Fritz von Opel drove a rocket car, the Opel-RAK.1 on the Opel raceway in Rüsselsheim, Germany. In 1928 the Lippisch Ente flew: rocket power launched the manned glider, although it was destroyed on its second flight. In 1929 von Opel started at the Frankfurt-Rebstock airport with the Opel-Sander RAK 1-airplane, which was damaged beyond repair during a hard landing after its first flight.

In the mid-1920s, German scientists had begun experimenting with rockets that used liquid propellants capable of reaching relatively high altitudes and distances. In 1927 and also in Germany, a team of amateur rocket engineers had formed the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (German Rocket Society, or VfR), and in 1931 launched a liquid propellant rocket (using oxygen and gasoline).

From 1931 to 1937 in the Soviet Union, extensive scientific work on rocket engine design occurred at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in Leningrad. The well-funded and -staffed laboratory built over 100 experimental engines under the direction of Valentin Glushko. The work included regenerative cooling, hypergolic propellant ignition, and fuel injector designs that included swirling and bi-propellant mixing injectors. However, Glushko's arrest during Stalinist purges in 1938 curtailed the development.

Similar work was also done from 1932 onwards by the Austrian professor Eugen Sänger, who migrated from Austria to Germany in 1936. He worked there on rocket-powered spaceplanes such as Silbervogel (sometimes called the "antipodal" bomber.)

On November 12, 1932 at a farm in Stockton NJ, the American Interplanetary Society's attempt to static-fire their first rocket (based on German Rocket Society designs) failed in a fire.

In 1936, a British research programme based at Fort Halstead under the direction of Dr Alwyn Crow started work on a series of unguided solid-fuel rockets that could be used as anti-aircraft weapons. In 1939, a number of test firings were carried out in the British colony of Jamaica, on a purpose built range.

In the 1930s, the German Reichswehr (which in 1935 became the Wehrmacht) began to take an interest in rocketry. Artillery restrictions imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles limited Germany's access to long-distance weaponry. Seeing the possibility of using rockets as long-range artillery fire, the Wehrmacht initially funded the VfR team, but because their focus was strictly scientific, created its own research team. At the behest of military leaders, Wernher von Braun, at the time a young aspiring rocket scientist, joined the military (followed by two former VfR members) and developed long-range weapons for use in World War II by Nazi Germany.

World War II

A German V-2 rocket on a Meillerwagen

Layout of a V-2 rocket

In 1943, production of the V-2 rocket began in Germany. It had an operational range of 300 km (190 mi) and carried a 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) warhead, with an amatol explosive charge. It normally achieved an operational maximum altitude of around 90 km (56 mi), but could achieve 206 km (128 mi) if launched vertically. The vehicle was similar to most modern rockets, with turbopumps, inertial guidance and many other features. Thousands were fired at various Allied nations, mainly Belgium, as well as England and France. While they could not be intercepted, their guidance system design and single conventional warhead meant that it was insufficiently accurate against military targets. A total of 2,754 people in England were killed, and 6,523 were wounded before the launch campaign was ended. There were also 20,000 deaths of slave labour during the construction of V-2s. While it did not significantly affect the course of the war, the V-2 provided a lethal demonstration of the potential for guided rockets as weapons.

In parallel with the guided missile programme in Nazi Germany, rockets were also used on aircraft, either for assisting horizontal take-off (RATO), vertical take-off (Bachem Ba 349 "Natter") or for powering them (Me 163, etc.). During the war Germany also developed several guided and unguided air-to-air, ground-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles (see list of World War II guided missiles of Germany).

The Allies rocket programs were much less sophisticated, relying mostly on unguided missiles like the Soviet Katyusha rocket.

Post World War II

Main articles: NASA and Soviet space program

Dornberger and Von Braun after being captured by the Allies

R-7 8K72 "Vostok" permanently displayed at the Moscow Trade Fair at Ostankino; the rocket is held in place by its railway carrier, which is mounted on four diagonal beams that constitute the display pedestal. Here the railway carrier has tilted the rocket upright as it would do so into its launch pad structure -- which is missing for this display.

At the end of World War II, competing Russian, British, and US military and scientific crews raced to capture technology and trained personnel from the German rocket program at Peenemünde. Russia and Britain had some success, but the United States benefited the most. The US captured a large number of German rocket scientists, including von Braun, and brought them to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. In America, the same rockets that were designed to rain down on Britain were used instead by scientists as research vehicles for developing the new technology further. The V-2 evolved into the American Redstone rocket, used in the early space program.

After the war, rockets were used to study high-altitude conditions, by radio telemetry of temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, detection of cosmic rays, and further research; notably the Bell X-1, the first manned vehicle to break the sound barrier. This continued in the US under von Braun and the others, who were destined to become part of the US scientific community.

Independently, in the Soviet Union's space program research continued under the leadership of the chief designer Sergei Korolev. With the help of German technicians, the V-2 was duplicated and improved as the R-1, R-2 and R-5 missiles. German designs were abandoned in the late 1940s, and the foreign workers were sent home. A new series of engines built by Glushko and based on inventions of Aleksei Mihailovich Isaev formed the basis of the first ICBM, the R-7. The R-7 launched the first satellite- Sputnik 1, and later Yuri Gagarin-the first man into space, and the first lunar and planetary probes. This rocket is still in use today. These prestigious events attracted the attention of top politicians, along with additional funds for further research.

One problem that had not been solved was atmospheric reentry. It had been shown that an orbital vehicle easily had enough kinetic energy to vaporize itself, and yet it was known that meteorites can make it down to the ground. The mystery was solved in the US in 1951 when H. Julian Allen and A. J. Eggers, Jr. of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) made the counterintuitive discovery that a blunt shape (high drag) permitted the most effective heat shield. With this type of shape, around 99% of the energy goes into the air rather than the vehicle, and this permitted safe recovery of orbital vehicles.

The Allen and Eggers discovery, initially treated as a military secret, was eventually published in 1958. Blunt body theory made possible the heat shield designs that were embodied in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Soyuz space capsules, enabling astronauts and cosmonauts to survive the fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Some spaceplanes such as the Space Shuttle made use of the same theory. At the time the STS was being conceived, Maxime Faget, the Director of Engineering and Development at the Manned Spacecraft Center, was not satisfied with the purely lifting re-entry method (as proposed for the cancelled X-20 "Dyna-Soar"). He designed a space shuttle which operated as a blunt body by entering the atmosphere at an extremely high angle of attack of 40° with the underside facing the direction of flight, creating a large shock wave that would deflect most of the heat around the vehicle instead of into it. The Space Shuttle essentially uses a combination of a ballistic entry (Blunt body theory) and then at an altitude of about 122,000 m (400,000 ft), the re-entry interface takes place. Here the atmosphere is dense enough for the Space Shuttle to begin its lifting re-entry by reducing the angle-of-attack, pointing the nose down and using the lift its wings generate to "start flying" (gliding) towards the landing site.

Prototype of the Mk-2 Reentry Vehicle (RV), based on blunt body theory

Cold War

Main article: Ballistic missile

Rockets became extremely important militarily as modern intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) when it was realized that nuclear weapons carried on a rocket vehicle were essentially impossible for existing defense systems to stop once launched, and ICBM/Launch vehicles such as the R-7, Atlas and Titan became the delivery platform of choice for these weapons.

Von Braun's rocket team in 1961

Fueled partly by the Cold War, the 1960s became the decade of rapid development of rocket technology particularly in the Soviet Union (Vostok, Soyuz, Proton) and in the United States (e.g. the X-15 and X-20 Dyna-Soar aircraft). There was also significant research in other countries, such as Britain, Japan, Australia, etc., and a growing use of rockets for Space exploration, with pictures returned from the far side of the Moon and unmanned flights for Mars exploration.

In America the manned programmes, Project Mercury, Project Gemini and later the Apollo programme culminated in 1969 with the first manned landing on the moon via the Saturn V, causing the New York Times to retract their earlier editorial implying that spaceflight couldn't work:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

— New York Times, 17 June 1969 - A Correction

In the 1970s America made further lunar landings, before cancelling the Apollo program in 1975. The replacement vehicle, the partially reusable 'Space Shuttle' was intended to be cheaper, but this large reduction in costs was not achieved. Meanwhile, in 1973, the expendable Ariane programme was begun, a launcher that by the year 2000 would capture much of the geosat market.

See also

• Jet aircraft
• Rocket
• Rocket engine