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During a battle with the Mongols, the Chinese used arrows outfitted with a rocket attatched to the shaft to repel the mongols. The rocket was made of a tube with gunpowder in one end and an opening in the other end. When the powder ignited, it provided thrust to propel the arrow. It's unknown how effective this was.
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Around this time, rockets were mainly used for fireworks and rarely used for warfare. At this time, Johann Schmidlap made a multi staged rocket where as the stages burnt out they would detach from the rocket.
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The English scienctist Sir Issac Newton layed the foundation for rocketry by orgainizing physical motion into three laws. These were known as Newton's laws of motion. This had a huge impact on the design and creation of rockets.
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Rockets were used as weapons of war in and Indian Revoultion, catching the eye of an artillery expert, Colonel William Congreve. He then paved the way for rocketry in the military forces.
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Congreve rockets were highly succesfull as weapons of war during the war of 1812. The use of rockets by the British to assault the American Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that later became the lyrics for the Star Spangled Banner.
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All over the world, researchers attempted to improve the accuracy of Rockets in warfare. An englishman named William Hale developed a technique called "spin stabilization". Exhaust gases struck small veins causing the rocket to spin like a bullet in flight.
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A russian schoolteacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed the idea of space exploration by use of rocket. He then later published a report suggesting the use of liquid proppelants to achieve greater range in flight. He also said that speed and range were only limited by the velocity of escaping gases.
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A rocketeer, Robert H. Goddard, became interested in finding ways to reach higher altitudes with a rocket. In 1919, he published a pamphlet entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes containing a mathematcal analysis of today we call the meterological sounding rocket.
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Hermann Oberth, a native german, published a book in 1923 about travel into outer space by rocket. This book inspired small rocket societies to start devleoping all over the world. In Germany, one of these societies developed the V-2 Rocket, used against the British during World War II. Although it was small, the V-2 rocket could achieve great thrust. It was so powerful that it could devastate whole city blocks.
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Robert H. Goddard continued his research and became convinced that the use of liquid fuel in a rocket could propel it higher than ever thought possible. Although encountering difficulty, he achieved the first succesfull flight of a liquid fuel powered rocket. It only flew for 2 and a half seconds, but it landed 56 meters away. Although unimpressive today, this rocket paved the way for a whole new era in rocketry.
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The United States and the Soviet Union both engaged in a race for achievments in the space frontier. On October 4th, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial sattelite orbiting Earth. Although Sputnik itself was not a rocket, it was what started the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. This led to the founding of NASA the following year.
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On July 20, 1969, the first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong. The launch of the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon was on the 16th of July, 1969. After returning from the moon, the crew used parachutes to safely land in the ocean to wait for the rescue crew.
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The first tourist in space, Dennis Tito, was transpoted to the ISS using a rocket. He was the first paying tourist to space.
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GRC thermal barriers were used to help rocket nozzle joints resist high temperatures. This was a helpful innovation used in many current rockets.
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A Delta 4 rocket lifted off that was tracked via sattelite rather than by radar. Using a sattellite for tracking saves a lot of money, costing much less than radar tracking.
