The History Of Rocket

Author : Hamsika Mudireddy

The principles of rocketry were first tested more than 2,000 years ago, but it's really only been in the past 70 years or so that these machines have been used for applications in space exploration. Today, rockets routinely take spacecraft to other planets in our solar system. Closer to Earth, rockets carrying supplies up to the International Space Station can return to Earth, land on their own and be used again.

Early rocketry

There are tales of rocket technology being used thousands of years ago. For example, around 400 B.C., Archytas, a Greek philosopher and mathematician, showed off a wooden pigeon that was suspended on wires. The pigeon was pushed around by escaping steam, according to NASA.

Around 300 years after the pigeon experiment, Hero of Alexandria is said to have invented the aeolipile (also called Hero's engine), NASA added. The sphere-shaped device sat on top of a boiling pool of water. Gas from the steaming water went inside of the sphere and escaped through two L-shaped tubes on opposite sides. The thrust created by the escaping steam made the sphere rotate.

Historians believe the Chinese developed the first real rockets around the first century A.D. They were used for colorful displays during religious festivals, similar to modern fireworks.

For the next few hundred years, rockets were mainly used as military weapons, including a version called the Congreve rocket, developed by the British military in the early 1800s.

Fathers of rocketry

In the modern era, those who work in spaceflight today often acknowledge three “fathers of rocketry” who helped push the first rockets into space. Only one of the three survived long enough to see rockets being used for space exploration.

RussianKonstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) published what is now known as the “rocket equation” in 1903, in a Russian aviation magazine, according to NASA. The equation concerns relationships between rocket speed and mass, as well as how fast the gas is leaving when it exits the propellant system's exhaust and how much propellant there is. Tsiolkovsky also published a theory of multistage rockets in 1929.

Robert Goddard (1882-1945) was an American physicist who sent the first liquid-fueled rocket aloft in Auburn, Massachusetts, on March 16, 1926. He had two U.S. patents for using a liquid-fueled rocket and also for a two- or three-stage rocket using solid fuel, according to NASA.