C. Breakthroughs and Modern Developments

     The discovery of rocket propulsion is no doubt a scientific breakthrough. The techniques of rocket propulsion also originated long ago. Ancient rockets used gunpowder as fuel, very much as in fireworks today. In AD 1232 in China, the city of Kaifeng was reportedly defended against the Mongols by the use of rockets. From the Renaissance onwards, references were made to the proposed or actual military use of rockets in European warfare. As early as 1804 the British army established a rocket corps equipped with rockets that had a range of about 1,830 m (6,000 ft).

     In the United States, the foremost pioneer in rocket propulsion was Robert Goddard, a Professor of Physics at Clark College (now Clark University). He began experimenting with liquid fuels for rocketry in the early 1920s. He launched the first successful liquid-propelled rocket on March 16, 1926. During the same general period, studies on spaceships and rocket propulsion were being conducted in several parts of the world. About 1890 Herman Ganswindt, a German law student, conceived of a solid-propellant spaceship that demonstrated his marked awareness of the stability problem. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian schoolteacher, published in 1903 A Rocket into Cosmic Space, which proposed the use of liquid propellants for spaceships. In 1923 a German mathematician and physicist, Hermann Oberth, published Die Rakete zu den Planetenr?umen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space). The book was supplemented by Walter Hohmann, a German architect, who published in 1925 Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelsk?rper (The Possibility of Reaching Celestial Bodies), which contained the first detailed calculation of interplanetary orbits.

     World War II provided the impetus and motivation for the development of long-range sub-orbital rockets. The United States, the USSR, Great Britain, and Germany simultaneously developed rockets for military purposes. The most successful were the Germans, who developed the V-2 (a liquid-propellant rocket used in the bombardment of London) at Peenem¨¹nde, a village near the Baltic coast. At the close of the war, the US Army brought back a number of the V-2s, which were then used in the United States, in vertical flights, for experimental research. Some German engineers went to the USSR after the war, but the leading rocket experts went to the United States, including Walter Dornberger, and Wernher von Braun.

pioneer space probe

     The Odyssey started off in the USSR. The US, however, soon took over the USSR in technology developments and became the giant in aeronautics. France, China and Japan did not hesitate to join the force. The launching of spacecrafts, space shuttles manned and unmanned, various satellites and rockets, the construction and usage of space stations and telescopes mark the many milestones set by Mankind along the journey. In the recent few decades, the US Apollo programs have made it possible for human to set foot on the moon (12 people stood on the moon in the six missions). The two Discovery space probes, the Atlantis, the Comlumbia, the Gemini and the Challenger are symbolic spacecrafts launched by the US, while the USSR has their Vostok and Soyuz series.

     The road ahead is long and full of bumpers, but we are confident in overcoming all difficulties and bring more glories to mankind in our progression.