Multistage Rocket - History and Development

History and Development

From an illustration and description in the 14th century Chinese Huolongjing of Jiao Yu is the oldest known multistage rocket; this was the 'fire-dragon issuing from the water' (火龙出水, huo long chu shui), used mostly by the Chinese navy. It was a two-stage rocket that had carrier or booster rockets that would eventually burn out, yet before they did they automatically ignited a number of smaller rocket arrows that were shot out of the front end of the missile, which was shaped like a dragon's head with an open mouth. This multi-stage rocket may be considered the ancestor to the modern YingJi-62 ASCM. The historian Joseph Needham points out that the written material and depicted illustration of this rocket come from the oldest stratum of the Huolongjing, which can be dated roughly 1300-1350 AD (from the book's part 1, chapter 3, page 23).

The earliest experiments with multistage rockets in Europe were made in 1551 by Austrian Conrad Haas (1509–1576), the arsenal master of the town of Hermannstadt, Transylvania (now Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Romania). This concept was developed independently by at least four individuals:

• the Lithuanian Kazimierz Siemienowicz (1600–1651)
• the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935)
• the American Robert Goddard (1882–1945)
• the German Hermann Oberth (1894–1989), born in Hermannstadt, Transylvania

In 1947, Mikhail Tikhonravov developed a theory of parallel stages, which he called "packet rockets". In his scheme, three parallel stages were fired from lift-off, but all three engines were fueled from the outer two stages, until they are empty and could be ejected. This is more efficient than sequential staging, because the second stage engine is never just dead weight. In 1951, Dmitry Okhotsimsky carried out a pioneering engineering study of general sequential and parallel staging, with and without the pumping of fuel between stages. The design of the R-7 Semyorka emerged from that study. The trio of rocket engines used in the first stage of the American Atlas I and Atlas II launch vehicles, arranged in a "row", used parallel staging in a similar way: the outer pair of engines existed as a jettisonable pair which would, after they shut down, drop away with the lowermost outer "skirt" structure of the booster, leaving the central "sustainer" engine to complete the first stage's engine burn towards apogee or orbit.