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For most of their history, rockets were little more than noisy curiosities and unreliable weapons. Then, in the space of a few decades, they became the machines that carried satellites into orbit, humans to the Moon and robotic explorers to the edge of the Solar System. In the second part of our history of rockets, we explore the technological breakthroughs, geopolitical rivalries and visionary engineers that transformed an ancient invention into humanity’s passport to space.
The rocket comes out of the shadows For centuries, the rocket was little more than an amusing novelty but, at the turn of the 20th century it was almost ready to take centre stage. At around the same that the Wright brothers were achieving mankind’s first powered flight, other men were already dreaming of flying higher and faster than Orville and Wilbur could have imagined. One such man was Robert H. Goddard. While the Wright brothers were figuring out ways to make an aircraft travel long distances along the ground, Goddard was trying to solve how to make an aircraft travel long distances on a completely different axis: the vertical. His earliest experiments were with solid-fuel rockets that were a little different to the first bamboo rockets used by the Chinese 1000 years before. In 1919, Goddard published a pamphlet entitled ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes’, in which he laid out his mathematical theories of rocket flight and described his experiments with solid-fuel rockets and the possibilities of exploring the Earth’s atmosphere and the space beyond [1]. Goddard became convinced that liquid fuels would make a much better propellant than the solid-fuel rockets he had been experimenting with. Unfortunately, no one had ever built a successful liquid-propellant rocket. Where a solid-fuel rocket needs only a lump of fuel and a hole to vent the gases, a liquid-fuel rocket needs all sorts of complicated things – like oxygen tanks, turbines and combustion chambers. Despite this, on March 16, 1926, a rocket designed by Goddard became the first liquid-propelled rocket to achieve flight [2]. Read the rest at Philosophical Magazine Comments are closed.
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