{"id":2545,"date":"2022-06-09T18:31:58","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T18:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2545"},"modified":"2022-06-09T18:34:33","modified_gmt":"2022-06-09T18:34:33","slug":"ftv-a-brief-history-of-rocketry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2545","title":{"rendered":"FTV: A Brief History of Rocketry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Perhaps there needs to be a qualifying statement tagged to the above title:\u00a0 A Brief History \u2018of Modern Rocketry\u2019.\u00a0 It is common knowledge that the Chinese were the first true rocketry pioneers (circa 13th Century).\u00a0 The Chinese used their newest invention, gunpowder, to launch celebratory fireworks and so called \u2018fire-arrows\u2019 used in battle.\u00a0 For our purposes, we will concentrate on the later developments of rocketry in the early to mid Twentieth Century.\u00a0 In that era, an amazing amount of research and experimentation in the field was taking place independently on three different continents.\u00a0 While these rocketry pioneers were separated by miles and oceans, there was a connecting thread between the young men who were involved. \u00a0 This common thread was science fiction.\u00a0 Before something can be invented, it must first be an idea.\u00a0 Most people interested in the history of rocketry miss the fact that people were thinking and writing about traveling in space (and to the Moon) before the rocket technology to do so existed.\u00a0 To give you an example of the power of words to make things happen, let us examine the case of one young English lad named Archie Clarke.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Authors Robert Stone and Alan Andres published a book in 2019 entitled <\/span>Chasing The Moon – The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America into the Space Age <\/span><\/i>(Ballantine Books).\u00a0 The book was published as a companion piece to a PBS film they produced for <\/span>The American Experience<\/span><\/i>, also called <\/span>Chasing The Moon.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>They began their story in 1932 when a then 14 year-old Archie Clarke laid hands on a book he spied in a store window, <\/span>The Conquest of Space <\/span><\/i>by David Lasser<\/span>.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 Clarke\u2019s aunt noticed his interest in the book and gave him the \u2018six and seven\u2019 (six shillings and seven pence) to buy it.\u00a0 Archie was already deeply interested in science-fiction thanks to the publications he would browse on the back tables at the Woolworth\u2019s store.\u00a0 During the hard times of the Great Depression, it is a wonder that Archie would be able to find American science-fiction books in London to begin with.\u00a0 Strangely enough, they arrived by the ton in ships;\u00a0 unsold copies (mostly pulp magazines) returned to the publishers in America were used as ballast in the trans-Atlantic ships traveling back to Europe.\u00a0 These magazines were then sold for a few pence each to stores like Woolworth\u2019s where youngsters like Archie Clarke could lay hands on them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When he purchased <\/span>The Conquest of Space,<\/span><\/i> Archie thought he was getting another science-fiction adventure story.\u00a0 What he got instead was a volume dedicated to the fundamentals of rocket science.\u00a0 It even included the details of an imaginary trip to the Moon.\u00a0 This accidental introduction to astronautics was Archie\u2019s first glimpse at a future where space travel might actually be done for real, not just in science fiction stories.\u00a0 When the Apollo 11 spacecraft began the journey to land the first humans on the Moon in July of 1969, Arthur C. Clarke would be sharing a broadcast desk with CBS news correspondent Walter Cronkite.\u00a0 In the 37 years after he had bought <\/span>The Conquest of Space, <\/span><\/i>Archie had become one of the most respected science-fiction authors in the world.\u00a0 His collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on<\/span> the top grossing film of 1968, 2<\/span>001:\u00a0 A Space Odyssey, <\/span><\/i>would further cement his esteemed place in the world of science-fiction.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Reading the book was, for the young Archie, both \u201cTransformative and liberating [to Clarke\u2019s mind].\u201d\u00a0 According to Stone and Andres,\u00a0 Archie’s fascination with the promise of space travel would motivate him and determine the direction of his life following that chance encounter with <\/span>The Conquest of Space.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>He joined a small cadre of visionaries, theorists, and space-travel advocates whose youthful dreams, curiosity, and determination led directly to humanity\u2019s first steps on an alien world only three decades later.\u201d\u00a0 As twe opined previously, \u201cYou have to dream it before you can do it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Russia\u2019s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, American professor Robert Goddard, and German physicist Hermann Oberth had similar dreams about rockets and space flight.\u00a0 Although they were working independently of each other, they would lay the groundwork others would build on in order for humans to fly in space.\u00a0 Of the three, Tsiolkovsky was more of a lone wolf whose work would not be widely appreciated until much later.\u00a0 Konstantin was a rather sickly child who read Jules Vern\u2019s <\/span>From the Earth to the Moon<\/span><\/i> as a teen and it stuck with him.\u00a0 In 1903, he published a paper that contained what is now known as the \u201crocketry equation – a mathematical formula comparing a rocket\u2019s mass ratio to its velocity.\u201d\u00a0 Though it was only one of nearly four hundred scientific papers he published (and would not be widely circulated for another twenty years), it marked the first appearance of information critical to later successes achieved in the field of rocketry.\u00a0 He was more a theorist than a hands on builder of rockets, but his work is now considered the foundational layer for the entire field of modern rocketry.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The author of <\/span>The Conquest of Space,<\/span><\/i> David Lasser, was a technical writer hired to be the editor of a new publication called <\/span>Science Wonder Stories.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Lasser went into combat in WWI at age sixteen and ended up being hospitalized for months after being injured in a poison-gas attack.\u00a0 He used his disabled-veterin\u2019s scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.\u00a0 His new boss at <\/span>Science Wonder Stories<\/span><\/i>, Hugo Gernsback, had coined the term \u2018scientifiction\u2019 for the stories he was publishing in his <\/span>Amazing Stories<\/span><\/i> magazine.\u00a0 Adding the MIT trained Lasser improved the literary quality of Gernsback\u2019s magazines almost immediately.\u00a0 Lasser followed the press accounts about the work of Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth which inspired David and a group of New York science-fiction writers and editors to form the American Interplanetary Society in 1930.\u00a0 Through his work as the president of the AIS, Lasser concluded curious readers would benefit from a book that explained the fundamentals of rocket science.\u00a0 <\/span>The Conquest of Space <\/span><\/i>was the result and a copy would eventually land in a London bookstore where young Archie Clarke would purchase it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Lasser\u2019s aim was not just to sell more books.\u00a0 He felt that, \u201cSpace travel will result in a new planetary outlook, the realization that \u2018the whole Earth is our home\u2019.\u00a0 With his natural talent for organizing people, Lasser decided that in the depths of the Great Depression, his interest in space would have to take a back seat to finding ways to reduce unemployment.\u00a0 Gernsback, his boss, tired of his political activism, finally telling him, \u201cIf you like working with the unemployed so much, I suggest you go and join them.\u201d\u00a0 Lasser went on to run the Workers Alliance of America, a group representing those employed by the Works Progress Administration.\u00a0 He eventually resigned his post with the WAA when factions of the group began pushing it toward Communist ideals that he did not share.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0President Roosevelt later asked him to form an organization to train the unemployed so they could transition back into the workplace.\u00a0 His nomination was torpedoed in the House of Representatives when a grandstanding representative from Texas described Lasser as, \u201cA crackpot with mental delusions that we can travel to the Moon!\u201d\u00a0 Lasser was dumbfounded that he could be smeared in such a way by his own government.\u00a0 He was anti-communist but he did have some socialist leanings and these also showed up on the negative side of Lasser\u2019s resume.\u00a0 He was effectively blacklisted from any government jobs as a result of the \u2018Red Scare\u2019 thus making one of America\u2019s first space advocates a sad historical footnote.\u00a0 The rocketry jobs that Lasser coveted would soon be given to German engineers who were imported to the United States at the end of World War II.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What Lasser did manage to do, however, was light the fire of space in young Archie Clarke\u2019s mind.\u00a0 In his own way, Gernsback also influenced Archie\u2019s future when he introduced the Science Fiction League Reader\u2019s Club in his publications.\u00a0 When a competing magazine, <\/span>Astounding Stories,<\/span><\/i> began publishing letters from its readers (including the correspondent\u2019s addresses), Archie was able to make contact with other members of the newly joined British Interplanetary Society in Liverpool.\u00a0 He joined and was quickly elevated to a leadership post and when they moved the homebase from Liverpool to London, their address would become the small flat Clarke would share with another science-fiction writer, William Temple.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When one of their demonstration rocket launches exploded, injuring three bystanders, the BIS had its wings clipped.\u00a0 The government declared all experimental rocket launches in England could be prosecuted under an explosives act dating from the last century.\u00a0 Undaunted, the BIS turned their attention to a theoretical exercise and planned a mission to the Moon.\u00a0 They also spent significant time deflecting very public criticism from the scientific community.\u00a0 The criticism led to the formation of the first of what are known as \u2018Clarke\u2019s Three Laws:\u00a0 \u201cWhen a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.\u00a0 When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Serving in the RAF during the war, Corporal Clarke was charged with teaching night classes about the workings of radar at a training center in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge.\u00a0 His lectures often drifted into aeronautics earning him the nickname \u2018Spaceship Clarke\u2019, he spent his spare time writing technical pieces for publications like <\/span>Electronic Engineering.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>His science-fiction career was still some years ahead of him.\u00a0 In late 1944, members of the BIS were gathered in a restaurant in London discussing Germany\u2019s V-1 rocket bomb when they were rudely introduced to it\u2019s successor, the V-2 when one landed nearby.\u00a0 Society officer Val Cleaver had just been telling the group that he had met with Willy Ley in New York.\u00a0 When he suggested to Ley that rumors of the V-2 were \u2018just Nazi propaganda,\u2019 Ley had cautioned, \u201cIf I were you, I wouldn\u2019t be quite so sure.\u201d\u00a0 The group were having quite a chuckle over Ley\u2019s caution to Cleaver until the building shook and swayed from the nearby impact.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Willy Ley had been a disciple of Hermann Oberth, the German rocket scientist who had published a book entitled <\/span>The Rocket into Interplanetary Space <\/span><\/i>in 1923.\u00a0 Four years later, Oberth founded the Society for Space Travel, a group which Ley was also a founding member.\u00a0 Filmmaker Fritz Lang approached Oberth soon after to give technical assistance for his science-fiction film <\/span>Woman in the Moon<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 The movie was not a hit, but it did introduce the \u2018countdown to launch\u2019 still in use today.\u00a0 Lang used it as a dramatic device to add suspense in the final moments before blastoff.\u00a0 Robert Goddard was sure Oberth was stealing his ideas, but there is no evidence of such a claim.\u00a0 It is true that Goddard became more and more reclusive in his work when he moved his testing to Roswell, New Mexico.\u00a0 It was not a bad idea because it was also no secret the Germans and the Russians were no doubt \u2018interested in\u2019 Goddard\u2019s activities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Willy Ley\u2019s work with the Society for Space Travel put him in contact with researchers all over the world up to 1933.\u00a0 When the Nazis began prohibiting any exchange of technical and scientific information dealing with rocketry with foreign countries, Ley became troubled by the direction Germany was headed.\u00a0 Those who ignored the bans were purged from academic institutions, many for racial reasons.\u00a0 Books and publications were removed from libraries and many were burned in college courtyards during highly public events.\u00a0 The more these radical policies were accepted as part of everyday life, the more alarmed Ley became. \u00a0 Politics, a cult of loyalty, blind patriotism, militarism, anti-globalism, superstition, and pseudoscience spurred by the Nazis regime began driving noted Germans like Fritz Lang and Albert Einstein from the country.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ley felt he had no other choice and went on a pretend vacation to England knowing he would not be going back anytime soon.\u00a0 Ley had told Cleaver that the V-2 was not a very effective weapon.\u00a0 When he saw a cutaway diagram of a V-2 in a copy of <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i> magazine, he knew he was right.\u00a0 The engineering was impressive, but the small payload it could deliver made it a, \u201cspectacular weapon, but a military flop\u2026an ineffective boondoggle,\u201d according to the <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>article.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the German high command diverted funds from development of jet powered fighter craft to the V-2 program, the left the Allied bombers clear skies and hastened Germany\u2019s defeat.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With the support of both the BIS and the American Rocket Society, Ley made his way to the United States.\u00a0 To his amazement, he found much resistance to the idea that rockets would be able to operate in the vacuum of space.\u00a0 Out of necessity, he supported himself writing science-fiction while searching for an opportunity to employ his skills in the field of rocketry.\u00a0 By the time he arrived on these shores, Goddard had already moved all of his research facilities to Roswell.\u00a0 Goddard\u2019s move was funded by a grant from philanthropist Harry Guggenheim after Charles Lindbergh and Edwin Aldrin put in a good word for him.\u00a0 Aldrin was a former student of Goddard\u2019s at Clark University and the father of the future second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Ley published his own article about the V-2 in an American magazine, he wrongly assumed the rocket had been the work of Hermann Oberth.\u00a0 He also was mistaken when he pronounced that those involved in the German rocket program probably did not survive the war.\u00a0 Ley and most Americans were not aware that a large contingent of engineers from the German Peenemunde rocket facility had orchestrated their own surrender after calculating their best chances for survival lay with the Allied forces.\u00a0 Led by the charismatic Werner von Braun, they were secreted to America during Operation Paperclip (so named because the dosiers about them were paperclipped together).\u00a0 Their counterparts who were captured by the Russian forces were not trusted enough to work on any classified projects and after a period of captivity, many were allowed to return to post-war Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Von Braun\u2019s team eventually settled in Huntsville, Alabama where they were instrumental in designing the rockets that would take Americans into space.\u00a0 There was an awkward period where the whole question of \u2018who will be in charge of the United State\u2019s future in rocketry\u2019 with the Army, Navy, and Air Force all trying to take the lead.\u00a0 When the inter-branch rivalries began disrupting the armed forces and burning through cash as fast as a rocket consumes fuel, President Eisenhower stepped in and created a civilian agency to run space operations.\u00a0 The National Aeronautic and Space Administration would put America\u2019s space fortunes in the hands of von Braun and company.\u00a0 The rest, as they say, is history.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Piece Video:\u00a0 As long as Archie Clarke was British, we will let Def Leppard represent with\u00a0Rocket.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Perhaps there needs to be a qualifying statement tagged to the above title:\u00a0 A Brief History \u2018of Modern Rocketry\u2019.\u00a0 It is common knowledge that the Chinese were the first true rocketry pioneers (circa 13th Century).\u00a0 The Chinese used their newest invention, gunpowder, to launch celebratory fireworks and so called \u2018fire-arrows\u2019 used in battle.\u00a0 For our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2545"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2548,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions\/2548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}