Abstract
The history of these strange machines places everything else about them in context. We will have a better idea of rocket future by knowing something of rocket past. In fact, the history of rocketry and rocketeers is very interesting anyway. So we begin our account of rocket science with its origins, both technical and intellectual (the engineering and the physics, respectively).
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Notes
- 1.
We prefer this term to the more traditional ‘rocketmen’, despite the association with Disney movies and sports cars, and despite the fact that almost all the people associated with rocket travel and development have been male, as we will see.
- 2.
The quote is from Toynbee (1967). See also the Quote Investigator article at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/09/16/history/ which makes clear that Toynbee was attributing this view of the contingency of history to other historians—he was critical of it.
- 3.
The spur of war applied to the development of manned flight is so obvious as to require no further comment from us; however the spur it provided, and no doubt continues to provide, to metallurgy perhaps should be expanded upon. Swords must be made of metal that is tough—hard but not brittle. The history of steel development is, in its early phase, very largely a history of sword technology. This development took place in different parts of the world and spread, like all good ideas. (Much of the steel for later Roman swords came from distant India, where the best steel of classical antiquity was manufactured, along the Silk Road.) See e.g. Feuerbach (2006) and Wilford (2006).
- 4.
- 5.
We need hardly say that all these early recipes for gunpowder, indeed for any chemical product from a thousand years ago, were entirely empirical. That is, the people who made gunpowder had no scientific knowledge of the ingredients, or why the recipe worked—they simply proceeded by trial and error. If a recipe worked it was kept; if fine-tuning the recipe produced a gunpowder that worked better, then the recipe was updated. This trial-and-error process (which is scientific, being based on observation and experiment) has led to great advances in many fields, from artillery to medicine. Theoretical knowledge acquired much later explains why the earlier trial-and-error methods worked, or didn’t work, but such knowledge was not always necessary in order to gets things up and running.
- 6.
The quote is from Turner (2009), Chapter 1.
- 7.
According to Turner, Chapter 1. The English word for ‘rocket’ is often considered to be derived from an Italian word rocchetto meaning ‘bobbin’. If so, the word was first used in 1566, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Or in 1611 ‘rocket’ may have come from rocchetta, meaning ‘a small distaff’, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.
- 8.
The earlier proposed dates for the introduction of fire arrows has been disputed by Needham (1986) who points out that the contemporaneous recipes for gunpowder contained insufficient oxidizer to be used as propellant. The discussion of this section is drawn from Andrade (2016), Liang (2006) and Needham (1986). See also the Wikipedia article Fire Arrow and (cautiously) the NASA website Brief History of Rockets. The Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO6I5OZpRDI is fascinating, if overly dramatized.
- 9.
The quote is from Kelly (2004). Bacon’s work on gunpowder formed part 6 of his Opus Majus. For more on the spread of gunpowder and rockets from China to the rest of the Old World, see e.g. Denny (2011) Chapter 2, Gruntman (2004), Chapter 1, Partington (1999). In many sources the spread of rockets is frequently attested by accounts of battles, but in these accounts it is often unclear if the incendiary devices being described are rockets or some other gunpowder ordnance, such as bombs or flaming arrows (arrows set alight, as opposed to fire arrows in the Chinese sense). The much-referenced siege of Kaifeng (1232-33 CE) is a case in point.
- 10.
Recall that Bacon specified hazelwood charcoal—in fact the type of wood did make a difference in gunpowder quality due to differences in porosity. The mixing process took many hours, resulting in a powder that was as fine as talc. Our discussion about corning is taken largely from Hall (1997) pp69–74, and Partington (1999) p xxvii. These two references are very good on the early development of gunpowder weapons in Europe.
- 11.
See Denny (2011) Chapter 2 for matching propellant burn rate to barrel length.
- 12.
- 13.
The book is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) known to generations of university students as the Principia. In it, Newton described the foundations of mechanics, which included his three laws of motion and his law of gravitation. Rockets were not discussed but, as we will see, the physics of rocketry was understood over two centuries later by applying Newton’s laws of motion. Modern spacecraft trajectories are calculated using the physical principles first laid down in the Principia, as we will see in Chap. 3.
- 14.
Two Mysore rockets in London have the following dimensions: “(i) Casing 2.3 in. O.D. x 10 in. long (~58 mm O.D. x 254 mm long), tied with strips of hide to a straight 3 ft. 4 in. (~1.02 m) long sword blade. (ii) Casing 1.5 in. O.D. x 7.8 in. long (~37 mm O.D. x 198 mm long), tied with strips of hide to a bamboo pole 6 ft. 3 in. (~1.9 m) long.” Quote from Narasimha (1985). There are Youtube videos as well as many written records about Tipu Sultan and his rockets; see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7KtJObvCE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8LkoxtsdII.
- 15.
Congreve himself never acknowledged the imported Indian rockets as the source of his designs, though the influence is clear and the opportunity evident. The Mysore propellant was carefully adapted to the humid climate of southern India; Congreve adjusted the gunpowder preparation and packing in the iron casing to increase their range. See Werrett (2009).
- 16.
See Winter (2014) for the use of Congreve rockets during the War of 1812. See also Encyclopaedia Britannica online entry Rocket and missile system at www.britannica.com/technology/rocket-and-missile-system#ref520811. These weapons were used widely by the British and led to an increased awareness of them by the general public: in 1829 one of the first steam locomotives was named Rocket by its designer, Robert Stephenson.
- 17.
For an interesting and detailed article on the Hale rocket, see Phillips (2000).
- 18.
Boxer also invented the primer cap design adopted very widely for centerfire ammunition cartridges. For line-thrower history and vivid accounts of rescues, see Duncan and Gibbs (2015) and the online articles at https://www.coastguardsofyesteryear.org/articles.php?article_id=116 from the Coastguards of Yesteryear website, http://www.countywicklowheritage.org/page_id__103.aspx from the Our Wicklow Heritage website, and https://cv.vic.gov.au/organisations/portland-rocket-shed/, the Portland Rocket Shed website. Also useful are Wikipedia entries Henry Trengrouse , George William Manby , Edward Mounier Boxer. The Youtube video Rocket line throwing gun demonstration shows a modern rocket line thrower.
- 19.
Here is our B-list, which will either mitigate or exacerbate our errors in drawing up the A-list, in the eyes of annoyed readers: Lagari Hasan Çelebi, William Congreve, Gaetano Crocco, Louis Damblanc, Kurt Debus, Walter Dornberger, Krafft Ehricke, Maxime Faget, Valentin Glushko, Conrad Haas, Karl Heimburg, Alexei Mikailovich Isaev, Frank Malina, Isaac Newton, Sam Phillips, Yves Le Prieur, Eberhard Rees, Eugen Sänger, Bernhard Tessmann, James Webb, Qian Xuesen.
- 20.
For more on this interesting character, see Kosmodemyansky (2000), the Encyclopedia Britannica entry Konstantin Tsiolkovsky , the Wikipedia article of the same name, and the online NASA biographical file at https://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/kon.html. For biographies and biographical sketches of many rocket pioneers (those mentioned here and others) see Chertok and Siddiqi (2005), Freeman (1993), Gruntman (2004), Nelson (2009), Potter (2017), Teitel (2015), Ward (2015) and the Wikipedia entries. NASA has a historical section with biographical details of foreign as well as domestic pioneers; see also www.astronautix.com,
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
The progress made by the German team under von Braun in creating the world’s most advanced liquid-propellant rockets during the war can be measured by his later comment: “Until 1936, Goddard was ahead of us all.” Indeed, Goddard analyzed a captured V2 after the war and concluded that the Germans had stolen some of his ideas. He was probably wrong about that; the German advances were made independently and resulted from much greater investment and resources than was available to the secretive American. Quote from Encyclopedia Britannica; see also Bergaust (2017), Ward (2005), Ward (2015) and the NASA website Biography of Wernher von Braun. A film biography of von Braun, I Aim at the Stars, was released in 1960. The controversy surrounding his interesting life can be encapsulated in comedian Mort Sahl’s satirical comment about him: “I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London.”
- 24.
- 25.
Hohmann’s influential 1925 book The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies—about space travel, not physical fitness—is available online in the NASA archive at https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19980230631. Most biographies of Esnault-Pelterie are in French; one English language biography is that of Gruntman (2007).
- 26.
- 27.
This section has been taken mostly from Chertok and Siddiqi (2005), Gruntman (2004), Smith (2014) and Teitel (2015), which cover the development of rockets in the 1920s and 1930s in detail. See also the U.K. Science Museum online post by R. Highfield, Russia’s 19th Century Cosmic Pioneers at https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/russias-19th-century-cosmic-pioneers/. For a fascinating article on the little-known exchanges between Goddard and Soviet rocket enthusiasts, see Siddiqi (2003).
- 28.
For comparison, we note that about 40,000 British civilians were killed throughout WW2 by German bombing starting with the Blitz of 1940, and 350,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing. More people (12,000–20,000 slave laborers) were killed in Germany during the production of V2 rockets than were killed by the rockets in England.
- 29.
- 30.
Much has been written on the subject of rocket and missile development during the Cold War. A good summary is provided by Encyclopedia Britannica: see the entry Rocket and Missile Systems/ Strategic Missiles. See also Carter and Schwartz (1984), Cimbala (2000), Hacker (2006) Chapter 9, Neufeld (1996), van Riper (2004) Chapter 6, United States Government (1990), and the rocket history website https://www.spaceline.org/history/6.html.
- 31.
This list is compiled from the excellent Encyclopedia Britannica entry Space Exploration, and from the Wikipedia entry Timeline of the Space Race. For books on the developments of this critical period, see e.g. Cadbury (2007), Leonov and Scott (2006), Nelson (2009), Turner (2009), Ward (2015), and Wolfe (1979).
- 32.
Quote taken from the NASA website Animals in Space, at https://history.nasa.gov/animals.html. Space critters receive a lot of coverage, both online and in print. See e.g. Baklitskaya (2013), Burgess and Dubbs (2007), Moye (2017), National Geographic (2015), Siddiqi (2003), and the Wikipedia website Animals in Space.
- 33.
This number is going up all the time, so to speak.
- 34.
There are any number of speculative books and (especially) online articles about the privatization of rocket development and space exploration. For two of the more informed and insightful try www.defensenews.com/space/2016/10/25/30-years-commercial-space-a-second-space-race-reignited/ by V. Insinna, and The Economist article at www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/10/18/the-space-race-is-dominated-by-new-contenders/.
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Denny, M., McFadzean, A. (2019). History: After Fireworks Came Weapons and Spacecraft. In: Rocket Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28080-2_2
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