Spaceflight - History

The realistic proposal of space travel goes back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His most famous work, "Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами" (The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices), was published in 1903, but this theoretical work was not widely influential outside of Russia.

Spaceflight became an engineering possibility with the work of Robert H. Goddard's publication in 1919 of his paper 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes'; where his application of the de Laval nozzle to liquid fuel rockets gave sufficient power for interplanetary travel to become possible. He also proved in the laboratory that rockets would work in the vacuum of space; not all scientists of that day believed they would. This paper was highly influential on Hermann Oberth and Wernher Von Braun, later key players in spaceflight.

The first rocket to reach space, an altitude of 189 km, was the German V-2 rocket, on a test flight in June 1944 . On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, which became the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The first human spaceflight was Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, aboard which Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made one orbit around the Earth. The lead architects behind the Soviet space program's Vostok 1 mission were the rocket scientists Sergey Korolyov and Kerim Kerimov.

Rockets remain the only currently practical means of reaching space. Other non-rocket spacelaunch technologies such as scramjets still fall far short of orbital speed.