Abstract
Why indeed. Rockets were first employed over a thousand years ago as fireworks and as weapons of war, and latterly—for the past sixty years—as vehicles for getting payloads into space. As weapons of war, they were something of an adornment for most of their existence—they looked impressive but served little function, playing second fiddle to arrows and then artillery shells. Only in the last century have they emerged from the shadows as engines of megadeath (which did tend to grab people’s attention). But so what?
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Notes
- 1.
For firework displays captured on Youtube, see e.g. What if You Burn 10 000 Sparklers?, Largest Catherine Wheel On Earth Guinness World Record, Watch Dubai New Year 2019 fireworks in full. For more details about all aspects of fireworks, see Plimpton (1984), Werrett (2010). See also the online Wired article by J. Greenberg: What’s Inside Fireworks: Glitter Starch and Gunpowder at www.wired.com/2015/07/whats-inside-fireworks/.
- 2.
The quote is from Burrows (1998), p 64.
- 3.
The National Association of Rocketry website is at www.nar.org. For the Tripoli Rocketry Association, go to www.tripoli.org. Many other countries have their own national amateur rocketry societies. The regulations governing their launches vary quite a lot from one country to the next.
- 4.
There are many Youtube videos of amateur rocket launches, covering the spectrum of rocket sizes. For low-impulse rockets that reach up to 450 m (1,500 ft) altitude, see for example the rocket competition of several enthusiastic young dudes at Model Rocket Battle; for more serious coverage and more powerful rockets, see Top 5 Amateur Space Launches That Actually Worked and GoPro Awards: On a Rocket Launch to Space. The latter videos show multi-stage rockets with onboard cameras.
Reference Works
Burrows, W.E. This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. (New York: Random House, 1998).
Plimpton, G. Fireworks: A History and Celebration. (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
Werrett, S. Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
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Denny, M., McFadzean, A. (2019). Why Rockets?. In: Rocket Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28080-2_1
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