Rocket 455

A rocket (from it, rocchetto, , bobbin/spool) is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using the surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely from propellant carried within the vehicle; therefore a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space. Rockets work more efficiently in a vacuum and incur a loss of thrust due to the opposing pressure of the atmosphere.

Multistage rockets are capable of attaining escape velocity from Earth and therefore can achieve unlimited maximum altitude. Compared with airbreathing engines, rockets are lightweight and powerful and capable of generating large accelerations. To control their flight, rockets rely on momentum, airfoils, auxiliary reaction engines, gimballed thrust, momentum wheels, deflection of the exhaust stream, propellant flow, spin, or gravity.

Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th-century China. Significant scientific, interplanetary and industrial use did not occur until the 20th century, when rocketry was the enabling technology for the Space Age, including setting foot on the Moon. Rockets are now used for fireworks, missiles and other weaponry, ejection seats, launch vehicles for artificial satellites, human spaceflight, and space exploration.

Chemical rockets are the most common type of high power rocket, typically creating a high speed exhaust by the combustion of fuel with an oxidizer. The stored propellant can be a simple pressurized gas or a single liquid fuel that disassociates in the presence of a catalyst (monopropellant), two liquids that spontaneously react on contact (hypergolic propellants), two liquids that must be ignited to react (like kerosene (RP1) and liquid oxygen, used in most liquid-propellant rockets), a solid combination of fuel with oxidizer (solid fuel), or solid fuel with liquid or gaseous oxidizer ( hybrid propellant system). Chemical rockets store a large amount of energy in an easily released form, and can be very dangerous. However, careful design, testing, construction and use minimizes risks.

History

In China, gunpowder-powered rockets evolved in medieval China under the Song dynasty by the 13th century. They also developed an early form of MLRS during this time. The Mongols adopted Chinese rocket technology and the invention spread via the Mongol invasions to the Middle East and to Europe in the mid-13th century. According to Joseph Needham, the Song navy used rockets in a military exercise dated to 1245. Internal-combustion rocket propulsion is mentioned in a reference to 1264, recording that the "ground-rat", a type of firework, had frightened the Empress-Mother Gongsheng at a feast held in her honor by her son the Emperor Lizong. Subsequently, rockets are included in the military treatise ''Huolongjing'', also known as the Fire Drake Manual, written by the Chinese artillery officer Jiao Yu in the mid-14th century. This text mentions the first known multistage rocket, the 'fire-dragon issuing from the water' (Huo long chu shui), thought to have been used by the Chinese navy.Needham, Volume 5, Part 7, 510.

Medieval and early modern rockets were used militarily as incendiary weapons in sieges. Between 1270 and 1280, Hasan al-Rammah wrote ''al-furusiyyah wa al-manasib al-harbiyya'' (''The Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices''), which included 107 gunpowder recipes, 22 of them for rockets.
In Europe, Roger Bacon mentioned firecrackers made in various parts of the world in the ''Opus Majus'' of 1267. Between 1280 and 1300, the Liber Ignium gave instructions for constructing devices that are similar to firecrackers based on second hand accounts. Konrad Kyeser described rockets in his military treatise ''Bellifortis'' around 1405.

The name "rocket" comes from the Italian ''rocchetta'', meaning "bobbin" or "little spindle", given due to the similarity in shape to the bobbin or spool used to hold the thread from a spinning wheel.
Leonhard Fronsperger and Conrad Haas adopted the Italian term into German in the mid-16th century; "rocket" appears in English by the early 17th century.
''Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima'', an important early modern work on rocket artillery, by Casimir Siemienowicz, was first printed in Amsterdam in 1650.

The Mysorean rockets were the first successful iron-cased rockets, developed in the late 18th century in the Kingdom of Mysore (part of present-day India) under the rule of Hyder Ali.

The Congreve rocket was a British weapon designed and developed by Sir William Congreve in 1804. This rocket was based directly on the Mysorean rockets, used compressed powder and was fielded in the Napoleonic Wars. It was Congreve rockets to which Francis Scott Key was referring, when he wrote of the "rockets' red glare" while held captive on a British ship that was laying siege to Fort McHenry in 1814. Together, the Mysorean and British innovations increased the effective range of military rockets from .

The first mathematical treatment of the dynamics of rocket propulsion is due to William Moore (1813). In 1814 Congreve published a book in which he discussed the use of multiple rocket launching apparatus. In 1815 Alexander Dmitrievich Zasyadko constructed rocket-launching platforms, which allowed rockets to be fired in salvos (6 rockets at a time), and gun-laying devices. William Hale in 1844 greatly increased the accuracy of rocket artillery. Edward Mounier Boxer further improved the Congreve rocket in 1865.

William Leitch first proposed the concept of using rockets to enable human spaceflight in 1861. Leitch's rocket spaceflight description was first provided in his 1861 essay "A Journey Through Space", which was later published in his book ''God's Glory in the Heavens'' (1862). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky later (in 1903) also conceived this idea, and extensively developed a body of theory that has provided the foundation for subsequent spaceflight development.

The British Royal Flying Corps designed a guided rocket during World War I. Archibald Low stated "...in 1917 the Experimental Works designed an electrically steered rocket… Rocket experiments were conducted under my own patents with the help of Cdr. Brock." The patent "Improvements in Rockets" was raised in July 1918 but not published until February 1923 for security reasons. Firing and guidance controls could be either wire or wireless. The propulsion and guidance rocket eflux emerged from the deflecting cowl at the nose.

In 1920, Professor Robert Goddard of Clark University published proposed improvements to rocket technology in ''A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes''. In 1923, Hermann Oberth (1894–1989) published ''Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen'' (''The Rocket into Planetary Space''). Modern rockets originated in 1926 when Goddard attached a supersonic (de Laval) nozzle to a high pressure combustion chamber. These nozzles turn the hot gas from the combustion chamber into a cooler, hypersonic, highly directed jet of gas, more than doubling the thrust and raising the engine efficiency from 2% to 64%. His use of liquid propellants instead of gunpowder greatly lowered the weight and increased the effectiveness of rockets.

In 1921 the Soviet