25 Greatest Inventions of the 20th Century: Rockets

Before the 20th century, many countries used gunpowder to make fireworks and launch missiles in battle. The Chinese had been doing this since at least the 13th century, and gunpowder quickly spread to other places like Japan, Korea, India, the Middle East and Europe. The first space rocket appeared in fiction. The 1865 novel From Earth to the Moon, by French writer Jules Verne, imagined an American gun club building a huge gun to shoot a ship to the moon. The novel got the science wrong, but it fired the imagination of two fathers of rocket science: the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard, an American. Tsiolkovsky hatched a plan for a rocket to be powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. In his plan, the rocket would include smaller rockets, or stages. The first stage would launch the main rocket high into the air, before dropping. Other stages would lift the rocket even higher. Goddard built the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket and launched it in 1926. Many more rockets followed, going as high as 2,600 meters and as fast as 885 kph. Goddard and Tsiolkovsky came up with basically the same mathematical equation to guide their rockets. After many decades and many advances, rockets have sent men to the moon and billionaires into the atmosphere. The term “rocket science” has also entered the English language as a phrase we use when we want to say something is simple: “Even a teenager can assemble an Ikea table. It’s not exactly rocket science.” (T) This article was provided by The Japan Times Alpha.