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From blastoff to touchdown, a rocket is an awesome sight.
The Saturn 5 rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon stood 363 feet high, about the height of a 30-story building, and weighed more than 6 million pounds. Its 11 rocket engines sent a spacecraft weighing more than 100,000 pounds to a lunar landing.
In 1930 Robert Goddard, a Massachusetts-born scientist working almost totally alone, was the first to set earthlings on the path toward space. Thirty-nine years after Goddard shot off his first rocket, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon. Since then, rockets have lifted hundreds of spacecraft and satellites into Earth’s orbit. They’ve carried space shuttles to and from the International Space Station. They’ve sent unmanned spacecraft to Mars and Jupiter. Some of the satellites beam back information about Earth’s atmosphere and weather.
A rocket is a type of engine that produces more power for its size than any other type of engine. A rocket makes about 3,000 times more power than a car engine of the same size. ▼
Dr. Robert Goddard stands with one of his rockets. Each part was made by hand in his workshop.
▲ Throughout his career, Goddard worked mostly alone, with little money or support. Rocket research was not considered a proper subject for a serious scientist, so Goddard experimented with rockets in his free time. Most of his experiments took place on his aunt’s Massachusetts farm.
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◀ Robert Goddard called himself a “one-dream man,” and that dream was to send a rocket into space. It all started on October 19, 1899, when he was 17 years old. He had climbed a ladder to trim branches from a cherry tree, and as he looked up, he had a vision of traveling into space. He later wrote, “I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended.” Afterward, he celebrated October 19th as the anniversary of his scientific birthday.
The Chinese invented rockets more than 1,000 years ago. The first ones were tubes packed with gunpowder (which the Chinese also invented). In the 1200s, Chinese soldiers fired these rockets at their enemies. ▶
◀ During the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key watched the British fire rockets on Maryland’s Fort McHenry. That led him to write about the “rockets’ red glare” in America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
▲ During World War II, German scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, developed the V-2 guided missile. German rockets dropped these deadly missiles over London during the war. American forces captured many V-2 missiles and sent them to the U.S. to be studied. After the war, von Braun and other German scientists came to the U.S. to do more research. They developed rockets that became useful both in weapons and in space travel.
▲ Today, rockets are a key part of modern warfare. Rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, are effective against lightly armored vehicles.
▲ In 1919, Goddard published a paper describing how rockets could reach the Moon. His first success came in 1926, when his liquid-fueled rocket climbed 41 feet at about 60 mph and landed 184 feet from the launchpad.
Rockets get their power from burning propellant. Propellant consists of a fuel such as gasoline, kerosene, or liquid hydrogen, plus a source of oxygen. Oxygen is needed to help the fuel burn because outer space has little oxygen. Most space rockets have two or three stages. The first stage, called a booster, launches the rocket. After the propellant burns, the spacecraft releases that stage of the rocket and uses the next one.
