Rocketry :: Essays Papers

Rocketry, the use of rocket power as a propulsion mechanism, has changed the boundaries of man’s domain.Before the advent of efficient rocket power, space flight was seen as an impossibility and exclusively the subject of science fiction stories.The nature of rocket power changed in the early twentieth century when a man named Robert Hutchings Goddard focused his research and his entire life on efficient rocket propulsion.Rocket power had been thought of long before Goddard’s time, but he was the first to have success with it. The earliest record of rocket propulsion dates to 1232 CE from China.Chinese Chronicles of the battle of Kai-Feng make mention of a â€Å"flying fiery arrow† that was used during battles â€Å"with telling effect against invading Mongol hordes† (xiii Goddard & Pendray).This object was a form of what we now call fireworks that was packaged with more propellant.During the middle ages, other objects were adapted from the Chinese invention in many other countries and were also used as a weapon to confuse, and to a lesser extent attack, the enemy.This practice was continued into the late eighteen hundreds. Rocketry did not progress greatly for a long time after its first uses.The next large advancement came from Hermann Ganswindt (1856-1934) of Germany.Ganswindt was a failed lawyer whose real passion was for science.He predicted rocket propulsion in theory and made the first design that was sound in principle in 1891.Ganswindt proposed his ideas to the German War Ministry, but was sadly rejected and was looked on as a non-professional scientist trying to do professional work.He had made the underlying theory that is used in modern space ships, but the theory was â€Å"too far in advance of his time for it to be understood†(23 Gartmann).Subsequently, Ganswindt had no success or advancement in the field and lost all his money in the aftermath of World War I preceding his death in 1934. Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion had been published and widely known for quite some time by this point, but Konstantin Tsiolkovski saw that the third law of motion provided the mechanism for successful rocket propulsion in space.In 1898, Tsiolkovski completed and published The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Rocket.The book meticulously and rigorously set forth the calculations associated with rocket propulsion.This act was the mathematical quantification of rocketry.When the calculations are examined, the physics of the propulsion showed that a liquid fuel, as opposed to a solid or composite propellant, would prove to be a more efficient power source and Tsiolkovski asserted that a liquid fuel would be necessary.