rocket

The three-stage Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo launches of the 1960s and 1970s. It stood 111 m/365 ft high, as tall as a 30-storey skyscraper, weighed 2,700 tonnes when loaded with fuel, and developed a power equivalent to 50 Boeing 747 jumbo jets.

Robert H Goddard, the ‘father of US rocketry’, in the 1930s. It was Goddard who pioneered the idea of rockets consisting of two or three stages, each with their own means of propulsion. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) named the Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland, USA, after him in 1962.

Projectile driven by the reaction of gases produced by a fast-burning fuel. Unlike jet engines, which are also reaction engines, rockets carry their own oxygen supply to burn their fuel and do not require any surrounding atmosphere. For warfare, rocket heads carry an explosive device.

Rockets have been valued as fireworks since the middle ages, but their intensive development as a means of propulsion to high altitudes, carrying payloads, started only after World War I with state-supported work in Germany (primarily by German-born US rocket engineer Wernher von Braun) and the work of US rocket pioneer Robert Hutchings Goddard. Being the only form of propulsion available that can function in a vacuum, rockets are essential to exploration in outer space. Multistage rockets have to be used, consisting of a number of rockets joined together, which are successively discarded during the journey.

Two main kinds of rocket are used: one burns liquid propellants, the other solid propellants. The fireworks rocket uses gunpowder as a solid propellant. The space shuttle's solid rocket boosters use a mixture of powdered aluminium in a synthetic rubber binder. Most rockets, however, have liquid propellants, which are more powerful and easier to control. Liquid hydrogen and kerosene are common fuels, while liquid oxygen is the most common oxygen provider, or oxidizer. One of the biggest rockets ever built, the Saturn V Moon rocket (see Saturn rocket), was a three-stage design, standing 111 m/365 ft high. It weighed more than 2,700 tonnes on the launch pad, developed a take-off thrust of some 3.4 million kg/7.5 million lb, and could place almost 140 tonnes into low Earth orbit. In the early 1990s, the most powerful rocket system was the Soviet Energiya, capable of placing 190 tonnes into low Earth orbit. The US space shuttle can carry up to 29 tonnes of equipment into orbit.

The first amateur rocket reached space in 2004. Launched from a desert in Nevada, USA, the rocket ‘GoFast’ achieved an altitude of 100 km/62 mi, the official edge of space.

See nuclear warfare and missile.