Liquid-propellant Rocket - History

History

The idea of liquid rocket as understood in the modern context first appears in the book The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. This seminal treatise on astronautics was published in 1903.

During the 19th century, the only known developer of liquid propellant rocket engine experiments was Peruvian scientist Pedro Paulet, who is considered one of the "fathers of aeronautics.". However, he did not immediately publish his work. In 1927 he wrote a letter to a newspaper in Lima, claiming he had experimented with a liquid rocket engine while he was a student in Paris three decades earlier. Historians of early rocketry experiments, among them Max Valier and Willy Ley, have given differing amounts of credence to Paulet's report. Paulet described laboratory tests of liquid rocket engines, but did not claim to have flown a liquid rocket.

The first flight of a liquid-propellant rocket took place on March 16, 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts, when American professor Robert H. Goddard launched a vehicle using liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellants. The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid rockets were possible.

After Goddard's success, German engineers and scientists became enthralled with liquid fuel rockets and design better liquid fuel rockets testing them in the early 1930s in a field near Berlin.