ROCKETS FIRE

ROCKET FIRE

The serious consideration of rockets as a means of propulsion is hardly a half-century old. In the last decade of the nineteenth century an obscure Russian Schoolmaster named Tsiolkovsky attracted some attention with his stories of space travel. The vehicle of his fantasies was a rocket which burned liquid fuel. Like the stories of Jules Verne, Tsiolkovsky's tales were popularly regarded as impractical romance.

The next most important personage in space penetration was a teacher at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Robert H. Goddard. His experiments with solid- and liquid-fuel rockets won him recognition by the Smithsonian Institution, but his prediction that multistage rockets of lunar range were possible, was thought to be the dream of a crank. However, Goddard was persistent and when, in 1925, his eleven-foot rocket rose nearly 100 feet, his ideas began to gain adherents, and groups of rocket fans began to gather, just as the ham radio enthusiasts gather now. In 1935 Goddard constructed a rocket that rose 7,500 feet from its New Mexico launching base. The first giant step in rocketry had been taken.

As in many other cases, war brought about the next step. When a country is in danger it will spend money and make efforts that it will not make, and that individuals cannot afford to make, under peaceful and prosperous conditions. In World War 2 the real development of the rocket began, both as ground installations against hostile planes and as sky-borne missiles discharged from the wings of fighter planes. The Germans led in the development of the famed V-2, which became the scourge of England. Those 13-ton, 46-foot rockets could climb a hundred miles high, and could travel 3,000 miles an hour. Shot from their German launching pads, they landed in Britain, destroying property and killing helpless civilians.