Rockets & Launchers

A rocket is a vehicle that obtains flight by the reaction of the rocket to the ejection of fast moving fluid from a rocket engine. Chemical rocket engines work by the action of hot gas produced by the combustion of the propellant against the inside of combustion chambers and expansion nozzles. This generates forces that accelerate the gas to extremely high speed and exert a large thrust on the rocket on the principle of Newton''s Third Law of Motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Rockets are used for fireworks, missiles, and launch vehicles for artificial satellites and human spaceflight. ^Wiki

The Chinese were the first to fire rocket missiles using gunpowder in the 13th century. Indians used them in the Mysore Wars in 1798. The British developed the Congreve missile in 1805 that was used in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. The Russian Tsiolkovsky and the German Hermann Oberth published treatises on rocketry in the early 20th century. However, it was the American, Robert Goddard, who wrote about rocketry and actually tested them and made them more effcient in the 1920s. Early rockets had been grossly inefficient because of the thermal energy that was wasted in the exhaust gases. Goddard attached a supersonic (de Laval) nozzle to a liquid-fueled rocket engine's 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%. From 1931 to 1937, the most extensive scientific work on rocket engine design occurred in Leningrad, at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory. Well-funded and staffed, over 100 experimental engines were built under the direction of Valentin Glushko. The work included regenerative cooling, hypergolic propellant ignition, and fuel injector designs that included swirling and bi-propellant mixing injectors. However, the work was curtailed by Glushko's arrest during Stalinist purges in 1938. In 1932, the Reichswehr (which in 1935 became the Wehrmacht) initially funded the VfR (rocket) team, but seeing that their focus was strictly scientific, created its own research team. Wernher von Braun, at the time a young aspiring rocket scientist, joined the military, followed by two former VfR members, and developed long-range weapons for use in World War II by Nazi Germany, notably the A-series of rockets, which led to the V-2 rocket (initially called A4). ^Wiki

In 1943, production of the V-2 rocket began. The V-2 had an operational range of 300 km (185 miles) and carried a 1000 kg (2204 lb) warhead, with an amatol explosive charge. Highest point of altitude of its flight trajectory is 90 km. The vehicle was only different in details from most modern rockets, with turbopumps, inertial guidance and many other features. Thousands were fired at various Allied nations, mainly England, as well as Belgium and France. While they could not be intercepted, their guidance system design and single conventional warhead meant that the V-2 was insufficiently accurate against military targets. The later versions however, were more accurate, and could be devastating. 2,754 people in England were killed, and 6,523 were wounded before the launch campaign was terminated. While the V-2 did not significantly affect the course of the war, it provided a lethal demonstration of the potential for guided rockets as weapons. ^Wiki