Early Rockets

Modern rockets were first
designed and built by
independent scientists and
rocket clubs on three different
continents, almost
simultaneously

The first modern rocket was
developed by the same
scientist that launched the
first liquid fuel rocket – Robert
Goddard

March 16, 1926
Robert Goddard launched the
world's first liquid fueled
rocket, a gasoline and liquid
oxygen engine
 Shown on the right held
upright by an external
tube-frame structure
Early Rockets

Many of Goddard’s
rocket designs and
patents were adopted
by:
 Nazis for their V-2
 NASA
 Guided missile
and large rocket
manufacturers

Goddard made many
of the greatest
advances in modern
rocketry
Early Rockets

Goddard’s modern rocket
advances included:
 High-pressure turbopump
propellant injection
 Regenerative cooling
(fuel/oxidizer used for cooling
engine heats propellants for
greater energy release when
combusted)
 Inertial (gyroscopic) guidance
during launch and flight
Early Rockets

Goddard’s advances in
rocketry garnered little
interest in the U.S.
military, but did attract
German weapons
planners who copied
many of his advances

Goddard completed his
career designing rocketassisted takeoff boosters
for the U.S. Navy
Early Rockets

A decade after Goddard’s first liquid fuel rocket
launch, the Guggenheim-funded aeronautical
laboratory (GALCIT) at Caltech (California Institute
of Technology) began a propulsion and rocket
research group inspired by Theodore von Kaman
and Caltech graduate students
Early Rockets

JPL was founded by Von Karman and a number
graduate students at Caltech/GALCIT including:
 Frank Malina
 Weld Arnold
 Apollo M. O. Smith
 Tsien Hsue-shen
 Jack Parsons
 Edward Forman

Tsien Hsue-shen who helped design the early JPLArmy missiles, was given the technical rank of colonel
and sent to Germany with von Karman at the end of
WW-II to evaluate the prized Nazi’s V-2 missile and
program
Early Rockets

The GALCIT rocket experiments
included liquid fuel motors first
launched in 1938

Von Kaman arranged for funding by
the U.S. Army in 1939 for the GALCIT
rocket team to develop jet-assisted
takeoff (JATO) rocket motors

The new JATO rocket effort was
converted into the Aerojet Corporation
that is still in existence
Early Rockets

A separate Army contract for small missiles was
arranged by von Karman through the Caltech
university in 1943

This was the birth of the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL)

Today, JPL designs and operates a number of
exploration spacecraft and programs for NASA
Early Rockets

JPL’s Army missiles were
solid and liquid rockets
that began with the
“Private” solid fuel 2-stage
rocket first launched in
1944
 16 km (10 mi) range
 Tiny Tim solid fuel 1st
stage (air-to-ground
missile shown on the
right)
 JATO solid fuel booster
2nd stage
Early Rockets

JPL’s “Corporal” was the first American
guided missile started in 1945 but did
not complete testing for deployment as a
surface-surface missile until 1955
 Weight 1,342 kg (2,960 lb)
 Range 139 km (8 4mi)

WAC Corporal was a 2-stage sounding
rocket that was the first American rocket
to reach space altitudes
 Tiny Tim 1st stage
 Later launched on a V-2 booster to
reach 250 mi altitude at speeds >
Mach 5 (Bumper rocket)
Early Rockets

JPL’s “Sargent” solid fuel surface-tosurface missile was a longer-range missile
designed to replace the Corporal
 Weight 4,530 kg (10,000 lb)
 Range 135 km (84 mi)

Deployed in Europe in 1963 as a tactical
weapon

Scaled-down Sargent solid fuel motors
were used for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th stages of
the Jupiter-C rocket that launched
Americas first satellite – Explorer 1
Early Rockets

By 1944, the Germans had developed and
launched the first long-range guided missile
the V-2 under the direction of Wernher von
Braun

Von Braun and the German rocket teams
had used many of the advances of Robert
Goddard a decade earlier to help with the
320 km (200 mi) range V-2

As the Nazis faced defeat in 1945, von Braun
and many of his team members surrendered
to the Americans in Bavaria, and were
shipped to the U.S., along with many of the
remaining V-2s
Early Rockets
Redstone

Von Braun and the German missile
engineers were attached to the U.S.
Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA)
and soon converted their V-2 design
into the ABMA’s Redstone missile, first
launched in 1954

Similar ballistic missile programs were
developed in the USSR in the 1950s
using captured V-2s and German
engineers

Both the JPL and the ABMA were
transferred to NASA in 1958
Early German
Rockets
Early Rockets

German liquid fuel rocket experiments began in an
amateur club called the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, or
VfR (Society for Space Travel) organized in 1927

Founded by Johannes Winkler, Max Valier, and Willy
Ley, the VfR conducted the first successful German
liquid fuel rocket test in 1930

Members included Wernher von Braun, Walter
Hermann, Eugen Sanger, and Herman Oberth
Early Rockets

The VfR club was disbanded in 1932

In 1934 von Braun and several of the
members joined Colonel Walter
Dornberger’s effort to develop a longrange missile that would become the A-4
 The A-4 was renamed the V-2 after
missile production began

After WW-II, the successful and effective
V-2 would become the prototype for the
first long-range missiles for both the U.S.
and the Soviet Union
Early Rockets

October 3rd, 1943 - 1st successful
launch of the German A-4 by Wernher
von Braun's missile team
 Weight 12,500 kg (28,000 lb)
 Payload 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) of
explosives
 Range 320 km (200 mi)

Ultimately, the V-2 changed the entire
character of military strategic
weapons
V-2
V-2
Early Rockets

Alcohol fuel (ethanol 75%,
water 25% for cooling and
stability)

Liquid oxygen oxidizer

Employed double-wall
combustion chamber
 Inner cavity allowed
fuel to circulate to cool
combustion chamber

55,000 lbf thrust (24,958 N)
Early Russian
Rockets
Early Rockets

Russia’s rocket programs also began with private
rocket clubs that launched the first liquid fuel rocket
inside the Soviet Union in 1933

Neither had government sponsorship, but were soon
recognized as important for future weapons and were
taken over and combined into a military rocket design
bureau RNII
 GDL was the engine design club
 GIRD was the rocket design club

The two most important members that later directed
the Soviet Space Race efforts were Sergi Korolev
(GIRD) and Valentin Glushko (GDL)
Early Rockets

The combined design group known as RNII began
advanced rocket-powered weapons programs in 1936

Stalin’s cruel and senseless purge of anyone
perceived as a threat to his absolute authority set
back the USSR in the years before WW-II (1937-38)

Stalin’s purges consisted of the murder, assassination
or incarceration of:
 any political adversary
 60% of the senior military officers
 engineers and scientists, even those related to
developing military weapons, including aircraft and
missiles
Early Rockets

The near-defeat of the USSR by the Germans in WW-II
forced Stalin to end his murderous purges and rebuild
the military and weapons industry

Rocket designers Korolev and Glushko were released
from prison, then sent to Germany following the end
of WW-II to study the Nazi V-2 technology and
organize the return of the missiles, and the scientists
and engineers
Early Rockets

The first advanced Soviet
rocket was a copy of the
German V-2 rocket
designated R-1
 First launched in 1948

The Soviet R-2 soon followed
with greater range and an
increase in the payload
compared to the R-1
 R-2 prototype rockets
were first launched in
1949
Early Rockets

The Soviet R-5 was their first launcher not based on
the V-2 basic design
 R-5 was the first to be able to carry their early
atomic bomb

Soviet advances were rapid because of Stalin’s desire
to quickly advance long-range surface-to-surface
weapons

U.S. chose to advance military aircraft and flight
weapons instead
Early Rockets

Efforts to develop missiles for submarine launched
warheads and intermediate-range boosters were
redirected in the early 1950s to build an
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could
deliver atomic warheads to the United States

Korolev was assigned the task of building Russia’s
long-range nuclear-tipped ICBM in 1954

Engines for the R-7 ICBM were designed and built by
Glushko’s design bureau
Early Rockets

The Soviet R-7 ICBM was
designed specifically to
deliver an atomic bomb as
far away as North America

R-7 program officially
approved in 1954

Launched successfully in
1957
 Range 8,000 km
 Payload 5,300 kg
 2-stage liquid fuel
booster
R-7
Early Rockets

The Soviet R-7 and its
successors have been used
to launch:
 Sputniks
 Yuri Gagrin and the first
cosmonauts
 Luna lunar missions
 Flights to Mars and
Venus
 Crews to their early
space stations
 Still used today to launch
satellites, the Soyuz crew
vehicles to the
International Space
Station, and the Progress
cargo vehicles
Early Rockets

By 1957, the U.S. had only the 300 km range
Redstone

Following the launch of the second Soviet Sputnik in
1957, a concerted effort was made to build larger
rockets and complete Atlas, the first American ICBM

Other boosters included:
 Thor
 Jupiter
 Delta (augmented Thor)
 Titan (ICBM)
 Saturn (turned over to NASA’s civil projects)

Most of these were later converted to civil launchers
Early Chinese
Rockets
Early Rockets
The Chinese space program
was started by one of the
most gifted rocket
designers in the early age of
modern rockets - Tsien
Hsue Shen (Qian Xuesen)
• Co-founder of the Jet
Propulsion Lab in 1943
• Helped design the early U.S.
Army rockets (Private,
Corporal, Sargent)
Early Rockets
• Tsien Hsue Shen received a temporary rank of
Colonel in the U.S. Air Force in 1945 to survey
the German rocket engineers responsible for
designing and building the V-2
• Returned to MIT in 1946
• Began teaching at Caltech and publishing
space flight research articles in 1950
Early Rockets
• Caught in Senator Joseph McCarthy political purges
in 1950
• Released from house arrest in 1955 and immediately
returned to China
• Started China’s first missile development efforts as
the Fifth Academy research facility in 1955
• Considered the father of Chinese rocketry
Early Rockets

In 1958, the USSR and China agreed
to technology exchange that
included the R-2 short-range ballistic
missile

China’s DF-1 (DF for Dong Feng
“East Wind”) was a reverseengineered Soviet R-2 first launched
in 1960

China’s first intermediate-range
ballistic missile (IRBM), the DF-2,
was first launched in 1964
Early Rockets

Chinese long-range rocket development continued
with the DF-3 and DF-4

New generation of launchers were designed for
heavier payloads based on the DF-4 named Long
March (Chang Zheng)

Long March booster was used to put China’s first
satellite in orbit in 1970
Chinese Rockets

China’s manned space
program began in 1992 using a
Long March booster and a
Shenzhou spacecraft that is
based on the Russian Soyuz
crew vehicle

First manned mission was
Shenzhou V launched in
October, 2003
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