A brief history of rocketry :
The principle of the rocket was tested more than 2000 years ago, but less than 100 years ago rockets were built to explore space.
The Greeks, the Chinese and the English imagined the principle of the rocket very early but it is with Isaac Newton (1642-1727) that things really started.
Newton formulated theories of gravitation and motion that fundamentally redefined how we think planetary motion and movement through space.
Newton’s third law of motion, which says that every action induces an opposite reaction, underlies the principle of rocketry.
Father’s of rocketry :
Historians agree on 3 names( knowing that these men were not alone and that they had teams with them).
– Russian Constantin Edouardovitch Tsiolkovski( 1857-1935) published what is now known as « the rocket equation » in 1903. Simply put, the equation concerns relationships between rocket speed and mass, as well as how fast the gas is leaving when it exists the propellant system’s exhaust and how much propellant there is.
– Robert Hutchings 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 US patents for using a liquid-fueled rocket and also for a two or three stage rocket using solid fuel.
-Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) was born in Romania and later moved to Germany, as a nazi engineer his legacy is complicated given that he worked for an oppressive, racist empire during the Second World War. His studies on multistage rockets were first used for Nazi attacks on Britain using the A4 rocket, better known to us as V2.
Rockets in early space flight :
Following World War II many scientists emigrated to the Soviet Union and the United States, assisting those countries in the Space Race of the 1960s.
In that contest, both countries vied to demonstrate technological and military superiority, using space as the frontier.
The most famous of these engineers was Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977) who was also a nazi with a complicated legacy. After emigrating to the US, he became famous for leading the design of the Saturn V rocket that took people to the Moon.
We will come back to the history of rockets because there is much to say.
Rockets have evolved a lot and today they can be reusable !
A real science fiction movie which is however the reality.