page_title: Rocket
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Rocket / History
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of William Congreve Esq. by James Lonsdale (1777-1839)
context_page_description: A rocket is a missile, spacecraft, aircraft or other vehicle that obtains thrust from a rocket engine. Rocket engine exhaust is formed entirely from propellant carried within the rocket. Rocket engines work by action and reaction and push rockets forward simply by expelling their exhaust in the opposite direction at high speed, and can therefore work in the vacuum of space.
  In fact, rockets work more efficiently in space than in an 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 Earth's moon.
context_section_description: The first gunpowder-powered rockets evolved in medieval China under the Song dynasty by the 13th century. 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. Rockets are recorded in use  by the Song navy 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.
  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, 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 to be fed to 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 Kazimierz 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 that Francis Scott Key was referring to 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 100 to 2,000 yards.
  The first mathematical treatment of the dynamics of rocket propulsion is due to William Moore (1813). 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. 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. 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 the combustion chamber of a liquid-propellant rocket. 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%.
  Use of liquid propellants instead of gunpowder greatly improved the effectiveness of rocket artillery in World War II, and opened up the possibility of  human spaceflight after 1945.
  In 1943 production of the V-2 rocket began in Germany. In parallel with the G
caption: William Congreve at the bombardment of Copenhagen (1807)
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