Pre-World War II Modern rockets originated in the US when
Robert Goddard attached a supersonic (
de Laval) nozzle to the combustion chamber of a solid-fueled rocket engine. This turned the hot combustion chamber gas into a cooler, highly directed
hypersonic jet of gas, more than doubling the thrust and raising the engine efficiency from 2% to 64%. On 16 March 1926, Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in
Auburn, Massachusetts. During the 1920s, a number of rocket research organizations appeared worldwide. Rocketry in the
Soviet Union began in 1921 with extensive work at the
Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL), where the first test-firing of a solid fuel rocket was carried out in March 1928, which flew for about 1,300 meters In 1931 the world's first successful use of rockets to assist
take-off of aircraft were carried out on a
U-1, the
Soviet designation for an
Avro 504 trainer, which achieved about one hundred successful assisted takeoffs. Further developments in the early 1930s included firing rockets from aircraft and the ground. In 1932 in-air test firings of
RS-82 missiles from a
Tupolev I-4 aircraft armed with six launchers successfully took place. In September 1931 the
Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD) was formed and was responsible for the first Soviet liquid propelled rocket launch, the GIRD-9, on 17 August 1933, which reached an altitude of . In 1933 GDL and GIRD were merged to form the
Reactive Scientific Research Institute (RNII) and developments were continued, including designing several variations for ground-to-air, ground-to-ground, air-to-ground and air-to-air combat. The RS-82 rockets were carried by
Polikarpov I-15,
I-16 and
I-153 fighter planes, the
Polikarpov R-5 reconnaissance plane and the
Ilyushin Il-2 close air support plane, while the heavier RS-132 rockets could be carried by bombers. Many small ships of the
Soviet Navy were also fitted with the RS-82 rocket, including the
MO-class small guard ship. The earliest known use by the
Soviet Air Force of aircraft-launched unguided
anti-aircraft rockets in combat against heavier-than-air aircraft took place in
August 1939, during the
Battle of Khalkhin Gol. Six
Tupolev SB bombers also used RS-132 for ground attack during the
Winter War. RNII also built over 100 experimental rocket engines under the direction of
Valentin Glushko. Design work included
regenerative cooling,
hypergolic propellant ignition, and swirling and bi-propellant mixing
fuel injectors. However, Glushko's arrest during
Stalin's
Great Purge in 1938 curtailed the developments. In 1927 the German car manufacturer
Opel began public demonstrations of rocket vehicles, together with
Max Valier and the solid-fuel rocket builder Friedrich Wilhelm Sander, called
Opel-RAK under the leadership of
Fritz von Opel. In 1928, Fritz von Opel drove a rocket car
Opel RAK.1 on the Opel raceway in Rüsselsheim, Germany, and later the dedicated RAK2 rocket car at the AVUS speedway in Berlin. In 1928, Opel, Valier and Sander equipped the
Lippisch Ente glider, which Opel had purchased, with rocket power and launched the manned glider. The "Ente" was destroyed on its second flight. Eventually glider pioneer
Julius Hatry was tasked by von Opel to construct a dedicated glider, again called Opel-RAK.1, for his rocket program. On September 30, 1929, von Opel himself piloted the RAK.1, the world's first public manned rocket-powered flight from the Frankfurt-Rebstock airport, but experienced a hard landing. The Opel-RAK program and the public demonstrations of ground and air vehicles drew large crowds and caused public excitement in Germany known as "rocket rumble". An amateur rocket group, the
VfR, co-founded by
Max Valier, included
Wernher von Braun, who eventually became the head of the army research station that designed the
V-2 rocket weapon for the Nazis. When private rocket-engineering became forbidden in Germany, Sander was arrested by Gestapo in 1935, convicted of treason, sentenced to 5 years in prison, and forced to sell his company. He died in 1938. Lieutenant Colonel
Karl Emil Becker, head of the German Army's Ballistics and Munitions Branch, gathered a small team of engineers that included
Walter Dornberger and Leo Zanssen, to figure out how to use rockets as long-range
artillery in order to get around the
Treaty of Versailles' ban on research and development of long-range
cannons.
Wernher von Braun, a young engineering prodigy who as an eighteen-year-old student helped
Hermann Oberth build his liquid rocket engine, Similar work was done from 1932 onwards by the Austrian professor
Eugen Sänger, who migrated to Germany in 1936 and worked on rocket-powered
spaceplanes such as
Silbervogel (sometimes called the "antipodal" bomber). On November 12, 1932, at a farm in Stockton NJ, the American Interplanetary Society's attempt to static-fire their first rocket (based on German Rocket Society designs) failed in a fire. In 1936, a British research programme based at
Fort Halstead in Kent under the direction of Dr.
Alwyn Crow started work on a series of unguided
solid-fuel rockets that could be used as
anti-aircraft weapons. In 1939, a number of test firings were carried out in the
British colony of
Jamaica, on a specially built range. In the 1930s, the German
Reichswehr (which in 1935 became the
Wehrmacht) began to take an interest in rocketry. Artillery restrictions imposed by the 1919
Treaty of Versailles limited Germany's access to long-distance weaponry. Seeing the possibility of using rockets as long-range
artillery fire, the Wehrmacht initially funded the VfR team, but because their focus was strictly scientific, created its own research team. At the behest of military leaders,
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. In June 1938, the Soviet
Reactive Scientific Research Institute (RNII) began developing a multiple rocket launcher based on the
RS-132 rocket. In August 1939, the completed rocket was the
BM-13 / Katyusha rocket launcher (BM stands for
боевая машина (translit.
boyevaya mashina), 'combat vehicle' for M-13 rockets). Towards the end of 1938 the first significant large scale testing of the rocket launchers took place, 233 rockets of various types were used. A salvo of rockets could completely straddle a target at a range of . Various rocket tests were conducted through 1940, and the BM-13-16 with launch rails for sixteen rockets was authorized for production. Only forty launchers were built before
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. After their success in the first month of the war, mass production was ordered and the development of other models proceeded. The Katyusha was inexpensive and could be manufactured in light industrial installations which did not have the heavy equipment to build conventional artillery gun barrels. In parallel with the guided missile programme in
Nazi Germany, rockets were also used on aircraft, either for assisting horizontal take-off (
RATO), vertical take-off (
Bachem Ba 349 "Natter") or for powering them (
Me 163, etc.). During the war Germany also developed several guided and unguided air-to-air, ground-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles (see
list of World War II guided missiles of Germany).
Post World War II Dornberger-Axter-von Braun.jpg|
Dornberger and
Von Braun after being captured by the Allies. Semyorka Rocket R7 by Sergei Korolyov in VDNH Ostankino RAF0540.jpg|R-7 8K72 "
Vostok" permanently displayed at the Moscow Trade Fair at
Ostankino; the rocket is held in place by its railway carrier, which is mounted on four diagonal beams that constitute the display pedestal. Here the railway carrier has tilted the rocket upright as it would do so into its launch pad structure—which is missing for this display. Mk 2.jpg|Prototype of the
General Electric (USA) Mk-2 Reentry Vehicle (RV), based on
blunt body theory. At the end of World War II, competing
Soviet,
British, and US military and scientific crews raced to capture technology and trained personnel from the German rocket program at
Peenemünde. Russia and Britain had some success, but the
United States benefited the most. The US captured a large number of German rocket scientists, including von Braun, and brought them to the
United States as part of
Operation Paperclip. In America, the same rockets that were designed to rain down on
Britain were used instead by scientists as research vehicles for developing the new technology further. The V-2 evolved into the American
Redstone rocket, used in the early space program. Independently, in the
Soviet Union's space program research continued under the leadership of the chief designer
Sergei Korolev. With the help of German technicians, the V-2 was launched and duplicated as the
R-1 missile. German designs were abandoned in the late 1940s, and the foreign workers were sent home. A new series of engines built by Glushko and based on inventions of
Aleksei Mihailovich Isaev formed the basis of the first ICBM, the
R-7. The R-7 launched the first satellite,
Sputnik 1, and later
Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, and the first lunar and planetary probes. This rocket is still in use today. These prestigious events attracted the attention of top politicians, along with additional funds for further research. After the war, rockets were used to study high-altitude conditions, by radio
telemetry of temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, detection of
cosmic rays, and further research; notably the
Bell X-1, the first manned vehicle to break the sound barrier. This continued in the US under von Braun and the others, who were destined to become part of the US scientific community. One problem that had not been solved was
atmospheric reentry. It had been shown that an orbital vehicle easily had enough kinetic energy to vaporize itself, and yet it was known that meteorites can make it down to the ground. The mystery was solved in the US in 1951 when
H. Julian Allen and
A. J. Eggers Jr. of the
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) made the counterintuitive discovery that a blunt shape (high drag) permitted the most effective heat shield. With this type of shape, around 99% of the energy goes into the air rather than the vehicle, and this permitted safe recovery of orbital vehicles. The Allen and Eggers discovery, initially treated as a military secret, was eventually published in 1958. Blunt body theory made possible the heat shield designs that were embodied in the
Mercury,
Gemini,
Apollo, and
Soyuz space capsules, enabling astronauts and cosmonauts to survive the fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Some
spaceplanes such as the
Space Shuttle made use of the same theory. At the time the
STS was being conceived,
Maxime Faget, the Director of Engineering and Development at the
Manned Spacecraft Center, was not satisfied with the purely
lifting re-entry method (as proposed for the cancelled
X-20 "Dyna-Soar"). He designed a space shuttle which operated as a blunt body by entering the atmosphere at an extremely high
angle of attack of 40° with the underside facing the direction of flight, creating a large
shock wave that would
deflect most of the heat around the vehicle instead of into it. The Space Shuttle used a combination of a
ballistic entry (blunt body theory) and
aerodynamic re-entry; at an altitude of about , the atmosphere becomes dense enough for the aerodynamic re-entry phase to begin. Throughout re-entry, the Shuttle rolled to change lift direction in a prescribed way, keeping maximum deceleration well below 2
gs. These roll maneuvers allowed the Shuttle to use its lift to steer toward the runway.
Cold War rocket, the second French rocket program, developed from 1961 Rockets became extremely important militarily as modern
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) when it was realized that
nuclear weapons carried on a rocket vehicle were essentially impossible for existing defense systems to stop once launched, and launch vehicles such as the R-7,
Atlas, and
Titan became delivery platforms for these weapons. Fueled partly by the
Cold War, the 1960s became the decade of rapid development of rocket technology particularly in the Soviet Union (
Vostok,
Soyuz,
Proton) and in the
United States (e.g. the
X-15 and
X-20 Dyna-Soar aircraft). There was also significant research in other countries, such as France, Britain, Japan, Australia, etc., and a growing use of rockets for
Space exploration, with pictures returned from the far side of the
Moon and uncrewed flights for
Mars exploration. In America, the crewed spaceflight programs,
Project Mercury,
Project Gemini, and later the
Apollo program, culminated in 1969 with the first crewed
landing on the Moon using the
Saturn V, causing the
New York Times to retract its earlier 1920 editorial implying that spaceflight couldn't work: In the 1970s, the United States made five more lunar landings before cancelling the
Apollo program in 1975. The replacement vehicle, the partially reusable
Space Shuttle, was intended to be cheaper, but no large reduction in costs was achieved. Meanwhile, in 1973, the expendable
Ariane programme was begun, a launcher that by the year 2000 would capture much of the
geosat market.
Market competition Since the early 2010s, new
private options for obtaining spaceflight services emerged, bringing substantial
market competition into the existing
launch service provider business. Initially, these
market forces have manifest through
competitive dynamics among
payload transport capabilities at diverse
prices having a greater influence on rocket launch purchasing than the traditional political considerations of country of manufacture or the particular national entity using,
regulating or
licensing the launch service. Following the
advent of spaceflight technology in the late 1950s, space
launch services came into being, exclusively by
national programs. Later in the 20th century commercial operators became significant customers of launch providers. International competition for the
communications satellite payload subset of the launch market was increasingly influenced by commercial considerations. However, even during this period, for both commercial- and government-entity-launched
commsats, the launch service providers for these payloads used launch vehicles built to government specifications, and with state-provided development funding exclusively. In the early 2010s,
privately developed launch vehicle systems and space launch service offerings emerged. Companies now faced economic incentives rather than the principally political incentives of the earlier decades. The space launch business experienced a dramatic lowering of per-unit prices along with the addition of entirely new capabilities, bringing about a new phase of competition in the space launch market. ==See also==