Who invented rocket technology

Was the rocket conceived from the very beginning as a weapon? Did the Chinese master the scientific principles of combustion and propulsion centuries before the West? The researchers discovered that the first rocket to meet this essential criterion was not, in fact, an aerial projectile but the more humble ti lao shu ground rat , a firework made from a bamboo tube filled with gunpowder that shot about in all directions on the floor. Thus, a means for combining the fuel and the oxidizer at the proper rates in the combustion chamber had to be developed.

The high pressures created by combustion required that the fuel and oxidizer be injected into the chamber under even higher pressure. After a number of design attempts, Goddard finally chose gasoline as the fuel and liquid oxygen lox as the oxidizer.

At higher temperatures it vaporizes, and produces tremendous pressures in closed containers. Goddard used the pressure of this gas to push both liquids simultaneously from their tanks, through separate pipes, to the combustion chamber where they mixed and burned.

To speed the vaporizing of the lox, he applied heat with an alcohol burner. There was a pipe connection for the pressurizing gas between the lox tank and the gasoline tank. Safety required that neither liquid should pass through this pipe and mix with the other before entering the combustion chamber.

Once the rocket left the ground, this gas pressure would be the only means for pumping fuel and oxidizer. Before launch, however, it was necessary to pressurize the system from an oxygen cylinder located about 30 feet from the rocket. Heavy rubber tubing fed the oxygen into the rocket's pressure line. As the rocket began to rise, this hose had to be pulled free. The resulting opening was rigged with a flap check value to slam shut and prevent loss of pressure.

The combustion chamber was equipped with an igniter system containing match heads and black gunpowder to provide the starting fire for ignition of the lox and gasoline when they were forced into the combustion chamber. In a moment, there was a tremendous roar accompanied by billowing clouds of smoke. When the smoke cleared, Wan-Hu and his flying chair were gone. No one knows for sure what happened to Wan-Hu, but it is probable that if the event really did take place, Wan-Hu and his chair were blown to pieces.

Fire-arrows were as apt to explode as to fly. Some of these rockets were so powerful that their escaping exhaust flames bored deep holes in the ground even before lift-off.

During the end of the 18th century and early into the 19th, rockets experienced a brief revival as a weapon of war. The success of Indian rocket barrages against the British in and again in caught the interest of an artillery expert, Colonel William Congreve. Congreve set out to design rockets for use by the British military. The Congreve rockets were highly successful in battle. Even with Congreve's work, the accuracy of rockets still had not improved much from the early days.

The devastating nature of war rockets was not their accuracy or power, but their numbers. During a typical siege, thousands of them might be fired at the enemy. All over the world, rocket researchers experimented with ways to improve accuracy. An Englishman, William Hale, developed a technique called spin stabilization.

In this method, the escaping exhaust gases struck small vanes at the bottom of the rocket, causing it to spin much as a bullet does in flight. Variations of the principle are still used today. Rockets continued to be used with success in battles all over the European continent. However, in a war with Prussia, the Austrian rocket brigades met their match against newly designed artillery pieces. Breech-loading cannon with rifled barrels and exploding warheads were far more effective weapons of war than the best rockets.

Once again, rockets were relegated to peacetime uses. Modern Rocketry Begins In , a Russian schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky , proposed the idea of space exploration by rocket. In a report he published in , Tsiolkovsky suggested the use of liquid propellants for rockets in order to achieve greater range. Tsiolkovsky stated that the speed and range of a rocket were limited only by the exhaust velocity of escaping gases.

For his ideas, careful research, and great vision, Tsiolkovsky has been called the father of modern astronautics. Early in the 20th century, an American, Robert H. Goddard , conducted practical experiments in rocketry. He had become interested in a way of achieving higher altitudes than were possible for lighter-than-air balloons. It was a mathematical analysis of what is today called the meteorological sounding rocket.

Goddard's earliest experiments were with solid-propellant rockets. In , he began to try various types of solid fuels and to measure the exhaust velocities of the burning gases. While working on solid-propellant rockets, Goddard became convinced that a rocket could be propelled better by liquid fuel. No one had ever built a successful liquid-propellant rocket before. It was a much more difficult task than building solid- propellant rockets. 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.

There are tales of rocket technology being used thousands of years ago. For example, around B. The pigeon was pushed around by escaping steam, according to NASA. Around 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.

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 s.

Only one of the three survived long enough to see rockets being used for space exploration. Russian Konstantin E. 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.