Rocket
A rocket
Multistage rockets are capable of attaining escape velocity from Earth and therefore can achieve unlimited maximum altitude. Compared with airbreathing engines, rockets are lightweight and powerful and capable of generating large accelerations. To control their flight, rockets may use momentum, airfoils, auxiliary reaction engines, gimballed thrust, momentum wheels, deflection of the exhaust stream, propellant flow, and spin, or may simply fly in a ballistic trajectory under the influence of gravity.
Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th-century China. Significant scientific, interplanetary and industrial use did not occur until the 20th century, when rocketry was the enabling technology for the Space Age, including setting foot on the Moon. Rockets are now used for fireworks, missiles and other weaponry, ejection seats, launch vehicles for artificial satellites, human spaceflight, and space exploration.
Chemical rockets are the most common type of high power rocket, typically creating a high speed exhaust by the combustion of fuel with an oxidizer. The stored propellant can be a simple pressurized gas or a single liquid fuel that disassociates in the presence of a catalyst, two liquids that spontaneously react on contact, two liquids that must be ignited to react, a solid combination of fuel with oxidizer, or solid fuel with liquid or gaseous oxidizer. Chemical rockets store a large amount of energy in an easily released form, and the consequences of accidents can be severe.
The term "rocket" is also used for small fireworks, which are the subject of article rocket.
History
-powered rockets evolved in medieval China under the Song dynasty by the 13th century. They also developed an early form of multiple rocket launcher during this time. The Mongols adopted Chinese rocket technology and the invention spread via the Mongol invasions to the Middle East and to Europe in the mid-13th century. According to Joseph Needham, the Song navy used rockets 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.Medieval and early modern rockets were used militarily as incendiary weapons in sieges. Between 1270 and 1280, Hasan al-Rammah wrote al-furusiyyah wa al-manasib al-harbiyya, which included 107 gunpowder recipes, 22 of them for rockets. In Europe, Roger Bacon mentioned firecrackers made in various parts of the world in the Opus Majus of 1267. Between 1280 and 1300, the Liber Ignium gave instructions for constructing devices that are similar to firecrackers based on second-hand accounts. Konrad Kyeser described rockets in his military treatise Bellifortis around 1405. Giovanni Fontana, a Paduan engineer in 1420, created rocket-propelled animal figures.
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 from a spinning wheel. Leonhard Fronsperger and Conrad Haas adopted the Italian term into German in the mid-16th century; "rocket" appears in English by the early 17th century. Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima, an important early modern work on rocket artillery, by Casimir Siemienowicz, was first printed in Amsterdam in 1650.
File:Rocket warfare.jpg|thumb|left|Mysorean rockets and rocket artillery used to defeat an East India Company battalion during the Battle of Guntur
The Mysorean rockets were the first successful iron-cased rockets, developed in the late 18th century in the Kingdom of Mysore under the rule of Hyder Ali.
File:William Congreve at Copenhagen 1807.jpg|thumb|upright| William Congreve at the bombardment of Copenhagen during the Napoleonic Wars
The Congreve rocket was a British weapon designed and developed by Sir William Congreve in 1804. This rocket was based directly on the Mysorean rockets, used compressed powder and was fielded in the Napoleonic Wars. It was Congreve rockets to which Francis Scott Key was referring, when he wrote of the "rockets' red glare" while held captive on a British ship that was laying siege to Fort McHenry in 1814. Together, the Mysorean and British innovations increased the effective range of military rockets from.
The first mathematical treatment of the dynamics of rocket propulsion is due to William Moore. In 1814, Congreve published a book in which he discussed the use of multiple rocket launching apparatus. In 1815 Alexander Dmitrievich Zasyadko constructed rocket-launching platforms, which allowed rockets to be fired in salvos, and gun-laying devices. William Hale in 1844 greatly increased the accuracy of rocket artillery. Edward Mounier Boxer further improved the Congreve rocket in 1865.
William Leitch first proposed the concept of using rockets to enable human spaceflight in 1861. Leitch's rocket spaceflight description was first provided in his 1861 essay "A Journey Through Space". The essay was published in a journal in Edinburgh that year before being included in his book God's Glory in the Heavens. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky later also conceived this idea, and extensively developed a body of theory that has provided the foundation for subsequent spaceflight development.
The British Royal Flying Corps designed a guided rocket during World War I. Archibald Low stated "...in 1917 the Experimental Works designed an electrically steered rocket… Rocket experiments were conducted under my own patents with the help of Cdr. Brock." The patent "Improvements in Rockets" was raised in July 1918 but not published until February 1923 for security reasons. Firing and guidance controls could be either wire or wireless. The propulsion and guidance rocket eflux emerged from the deflecting cowl at the nose.
In 1920, Professor Robert Goddard of Clark University published proposed improvements to rocket technology in A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. In 1923, Hermann Oberth published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen. Modern rockets originated in 1926 when Goddard attached a supersonic nozzle to a high pressure combustion chamber. 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%. His use of liquid propellants instead of gunpowder greatly lowered the weight and increased the effectiveness of rockets.
File:RIAN archive 303890 A battery of Katyusha during the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War.jpg|thumb|A battery of Soviet Katyusha rocket launchers fires at German forces during the Battle of Stalingrad, 6 October 1942
In 1921, the Soviet research and development laboratory Gas Dynamics Laboratory began developing solid-propellant rockets, which resulted in the first launch in 1928, which flew for approximately 1,300 metres. These rockets were used in 1931 for the world's first successful use of rockets for jet-assisted takeoff of aircraft and became the prototypes for the Katyusha rocket launcher, which were used during World War II.
In 1929, Fritz Lang's German science fiction film Woman in the Moon was released. It showcased the use of a multi-stage rocket, and also pioneered the concept of a rocket launch pad and the rocket-launch countdown clock. The Guardian film critic Stephen Armstrong states Lang "created the rocket industry". Lang was inspired by the 1923 book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space by Hermann Oberth, who became the film's scientific adviser and later an important figure in the team that developed the V-2 rocket. The film was thought to be so realistic that it was banned by the Nazis when they came to power for fear it would reveal secrets about the V-2 rockets.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 141-1880, Peenemünde, Start einer V2.jpg|thumb|left|upright|V-2 rocket launched from Test Stand VII, summer of 1943
In 1943 production of the V-2 rocket began in Germany. It was designed by the Peenemünde Army Research Center with Wernher von Braun serving as the technical director. The V-2 became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944. Doug Millard, space historian and curator of space technology at the Science Museum, London, where a V-2 is exhibited in the main exhibition hall, states: "The V-2 was a quantum leap of technological change. We got to the Moon using V-2 technology but this was technology that was developed with massive resources, including some particularly grim ones. The V-2 programme was hugely expensive in terms of lives, with the Nazis using slave labour to manufacture these rockets". In parallel with the German guided-missile programme, rockets were also used on aircraft, either for assisting horizontal take-off, vertical take-off or for powering them. The Allies' rocket programs were less technological, relying mostly on unguided missiles like the Soviet Katyusha rocket in the artillery role, and the American anti tank bazooka projectile. These used solid chemical propellants.
The Americans captured a large number of German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, in 1945, and brought them to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. After World War II scientists used rockets to study high-altitude conditions, by radio telemetry of temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, detection of cosmic rays, and further techniques; note too the Bell X-1, the first crewed vehicle to break the sound barrier. Independently, in the Soviet Union's space program research continued under the leadership of the chief designer Sergei Korolev.
During the Cold War rockets became extremely important militarily with the development of modern intercontinental ballistic missiles. The 1960s saw rapid development of rocket technology, particularly in the Soviet Union and in the United States. Rockets came into use for space exploration. American crewed programs culminated in 1969 with the first crewed landing on the Moon – using equipment launched by the Saturn V rocket.