History of rockets
The first rockets were used as propulsion systems for arrows, and may have appeared as early as the 10th century in Song dynasty China. However more solid documentary evidence does not appear until the 13th century. The technology probably spread across Eurasia in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the mid-13th century. Usage of rockets as weapons before modern rocketry is attested in China, Korea, the India, and Europe. One of the first recorded rocket launchers is the "wasp nest" fire arrow launcher produced by the Ming dynasty in 1380. In Europe rockets were also used in the same year at the Battle of Chioggia. The Joseon kingdom of Korea used a type of mobile multiple rocket launcher known as the "Munjong Hwacha" by 1451.
The use of rockets in war became outdated by 15th century. The use of rockets in wars was revived with the creation of iron-cased rockets, known as Mysorean rockets, which was developed in Indian Kingdom of Mysore during the mid 18th century, and were later copied by the British. The later models and improvements were known as the Congreve rocket and used in the Napoleonic Wars.
China
The dating of the invention of the first rocket, otherwise known as the gunpowder propelled fire arrow, is disputed. The History of Song attributes the invention to two different people at different times, Feng Zhisheng in 969 and Tang Fu in 1000. However Joseph Needham argues that rockets could not have existed before the 12th century, since the gunpowder formulas listed in the Wujing Zongyao are not suitable as rocket propellant.Rockets may have been used as early as 1232, when reports appeared describing fire arrows and 'iron pots' that could be heard for 5 leagues when they exploded upon impact, causing devastation for a radius of, apparently due to shrapnel. Rockets are recorded to have been used by the Song navy in a military exercise dated to 1245. Internal-combustion rocket propulsion is mentioned in a reference to 1264, recording that the 'ground-rat,' a type of firework, had frightened the Empress-Mother Gongsheng at a feast held in her honor by her son the Emperor Lizong.
Subsequently, rockets are included in the military treatise Huolongjing, also known as the Fire Drake Manual, written by the Chinese artillery officer Jiao Yu in the mid-14th century. This text mentions the first known multistage rocket, the 'fire-dragon issuing from the water', thought to have been used by the Chinese navy.
Rocket launchers known as "wasp nests" were ordered by the Ming army in 1380.
The American historian 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
Mongols
The Chinese fire arrow was adopted by the Mongols in northern China, who employed Chinese rocketry experts as mercenaries in the Mongol army. Rockets are thought to have spread via the Mongol invasions to other areas of Eurasia in the mid 13th century.Rocket-like weapons are reported to have been used at the Battle of Mohi in the year 1241.
Middle East
Between 1270 and 1280, Hasan al-Rammah wrote his al-furusiyyah wa al-manasib al-harbiyya, 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 indicates a Chinese origin for the gunpowder weapons he wrote about, such as rockets and fire lances. Ibn al-Baitar, an Arab from Spain who had immigrated to Egypt, described saltpeter as "snow of China". Al-Baytar died in 1248. The earlier Arab historians called saltpeter "Chinese snow" and " Chinese salt."The Arabs used the name "Chinese arrows" to refer to rockets. The Arabs called fireworks "Chinese flowers". While saltpeter was called "Chinese Snow" by Arabs, it was called "Chinese salt" by the Iranians, or "salt from the Chinese marshes".
India
In 1300 Mongol mercenaries in India are recorded to have used hand held rockets. By the mid-14th century Indians were also using rockets in warfare.Korea
The Korean kingdom of Joseon started producing gunpowder in 1374 and was producing cannons and rockets by 1377. However the multiple rocket launching carts known as the "Munjong hwacha" did not appear until 1451.Europe
In Europe, Roger Bacon mentions gunpowder in his Opus Majus of 1267.However rockets do not feature in European warfare until the 1380 Battle of Chioggia.
Konrad Kyeser described rockets in his famous military treatise Bellifortis around 1405.
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 Chioggia in 1380. It is uncertain whether Muratori was correct in his interpretation, as the reference might also have been to bombard, butMuratori 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 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. 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
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 of gunpowder from Sarayburnu, the point below Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.Siemienowicz
"Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima", 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, including multi-stage rockets, batteries of rockets, and rockets with delta wing stabilizers.Indian Mysorean rockets
In 1792, the first iron-cased rockets were successfully developed and used by Tipu Sultan - the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore 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. After Tipu's 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
, son of the Comptroller of the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, London, became a major figure in the field. From 1801 Congreve researched the original design of Mysore rockets and started 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. The Royal Arsenal's first demonstration of solid-fuel rockets took place in 1805. The rockets were effectively used during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Congreve published three books on rocketry.Subsequently, 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 in 1815.
Early rockets were very inaccurate. Without the use of spinning or any controlling feedback-loop, they had a strong tendency to veer sharply away from their intended course. The early Mysorean rockets and their successor British Congreve rockets reduced veer somewhat by attaching a long stick to the end of a rocket to make it harder for the rocket to change course. The largest of the Congreve rockets was the 32-pound Carcass, which had a 15-foot stick. Originally, sticks were mounted on the side, but this was later changed to mounting them 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 developing military gunpowder-rockets. He constructed rocket-launching platforms 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 formed the first rocket sub-unit in the Imperial 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. The research took place in the Warsaw Arsenal, where captain Józef Kosiński also developed multiple-rocket launchers adapted from horse artillery gun carriage. The 1st Rocketeer Corps formed in 1822; it first saw combat during the Polish–Russian War 1830–31.
Accuracy 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 by placing two rockets in one tube, one behind the other.
Early 20th-century rocket pioneers
At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, fueled by the creativity of fiction writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells as well as philosophical movements like Russian cosmism. 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, inspired by Verne and Cosmism, published Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами, the first serious scientific work on space travel. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation—the principle that governs rocket propulsion—is named in his honor. 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.
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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 to power a jet drive.
In 1912 Robert Goddard, inspired from an early age by H.G. Wells and by his personal interest in science, 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 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.
During World War I Yves Le Prieur, a French naval officer and inventor, later to create a pioneering scuba diving apparatus, developed air-to-air solid-fuel rockets. The aim was to destroy observation captive balloons used by German artillery. These rather crude black powder, steel-tipped incendiary rockets were first tested from a Voisin aircraft, wing-bolted on a fast Picard Pictet sports car and then used in battle on real aircraft. A typical layout was eight electrically fired Le Prieur rockets fitted on the interpane struts of a Nieuport aircraft. If fired at sufficiently short distance, a spread of Le Prieur rockets proved to be quite deadly. Belgian ace Willy Coppens claimed dozens of Drachen kills during World War I.
In 1920, Goddard published his 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:
In 1923, Hermann Oberth published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, 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
Modern rockets originated when Goddard attached a supersonic 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, and in 1931 launched a liquid propellant rocket.
Rocketry in the Soviet Union also began with amateur societies; foremost was the Group for the Study of Reactive Propulsion headed by Friedrich Zander and Sergei Korolev. From 1931 to 1937 in the Soviet Union, extensive scientific work on rocket engine design occurred at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in Leningrad, which was merged with GIRD in 1933 bringing rocketry fully under government control. 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.
On November 12, 1932 at a farm in Stockton NJ, the American Interplanetary Society's attempt to static-fire their first rocket failed in a fire.
In 1936, a British research programme based at Fort Halstead in Kent 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 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 and developed long-range weapons for use in World War II by Nazi Germany.
World War II
At the start of the war, the British had equipped their warships with unrotated projectile unguided anti-aircraft rockets, and by 1940, the Germans had developed a surface-to-surface multiple rocket launcher, the Nebelwerfer, and the Soviets already had introduced the RS-132 air-to-ground rocket. All of these rockets were developed for a variety of roles, notably the Katyusha rocket.In 1943, production of the V-2 rocket began in Germany. It had an operational range of and carried a warhead, with an amatol explosive charge. It normally achieved an operational maximum altitude of around, but could achieve 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 they were 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, vertical take-off or for powering them. During the war Germany also developed several guided and unguided air-to-air, ground-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles.
Post World War II
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 made the counterintuitive discovery that a blunt shape 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. 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 uses a combination of a ballistic entry ; and then at an altitude of about, the atmosphere becomes dense enough for the aerodynamic re-entry phase to begin. Throughout re-entry, the Shuttle rolls to change lift direction in a prescribed way, keeping maximum deceleration well below 2 gs. These roll maneuvers allow the Shuttle to use its lift to steer toward the runway.
Cold War
Rockets became extremely important militarily as modern intercontinental ballistic missiles when it was realized that nuclear weapons carried on a rocket vehicle were essentially impossible for existing defense systems to stop once launched, and launch vehicles such as the R-7, Atlas, and Titan became delivery platforms for these weapons.Fueled partly by the Cold War, the 1960s became the decade of rapid development of rocket technology particularly in the Soviet Union and in the United States. There was also significant research in other countries, such as France, 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 spaceflight programs, Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and later the Apollo program, culminated in 1969 with the first manned landing on the Moon using the Saturn V, causing the New York Times to retract its earlier 1920 editorial implying that spaceflight couldn't work:
In the 1970s, the United States made five more lunar landings before cancelling the Apollo program in 1975. The replacement vehicle, the partially reusable Space Shuttle, was intended to be cheaper, but no large reduction in costs was achieved. Meanwhile, in 1973, the expendable Ariane programme was begun, a launcher that by the year 2000 would capture much of the geosat market.
Market competition
Since the early 2010s, new private options for obtaining spaceflight services emerged, bringing substantial market competition into the existing launch service provider business.Initially, these market forces have manifest through competitive dynamics among payload transport capabilities at diverse prices having a greater influence on rocket launch purchasing than the traditional political considerations of country of manufacture or the particular national entity using, regulating or licensing the launch service.
Following the advent of spaceflight technology in the late 1950s, space launch services came into being, exclusively by national programs. Later in the 20th century commercial operators became significant customers of launch providers. International competition for the communications satellite payload subset of the launch market was increasingly influenced by commercial considerations. However, even during this period, for both commercial- and government-entity-launched commsats, the launch service providers for these payloads used launch vehicles built to government specifications, and with state-provided development funding exclusively.
In the early 2010s, privately developed launch vehicle systems and space launch service offerings emerged. Companies now faced economic incentives rather than the principally political incentives of the earlier decades. The space launch business experienced a dramatic lowering of per-unit prices along with the addition of entirely new capabilities, bringing about a new phase of competition in the space launch market.