SpaceX, a private company working towards commercial space travel, launches Falcon 9. This unmanned capsule orbits the Earth twice before landing in the Pacific Ocean. Juno is launched to begin its 5-year journey to Jupiter. It arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July and has been beaming back data and onservations since then. Countries and organisations continue to send probes and make plans to send people to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Rocket Lab is only the 3rd private company in the world to launch a rocket into space and their Mahia facility is the world's first private orbital launch site.
Rocket Lab achieves their first commercial deployment from Mahia. It lifted 6 satellites and a technology demonstrator into low Earth orbit. The United Arab Emirates Space Agency's Hope orbiter reaches Mars orbit in February and begins collecting data with the goal of getting a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers. The Nasa rover Perseverance lands on Mars as part of an epic quest to bring back rocks that could tell whether life ever existed on the red planet.
Read more about these burst of activity in in the this Stardome article Busy month for Mars missions. Billionaire Sir Richard Branson and his crew successfully reach the edge of space on board the Virgin Galactic rocket plane — becoming the first of the new space tourism pioneers to try out their own vehicles.
The true rocket was born. The date reporting the first use of true rockets was in At this time, the Chinese and the Mongols were at war with each other. During the battle of Kai-Keng, the Chinese repelled the Mongol invaders by a barrage of "arrows of flying fire. A tube, capped at one end, contained gunpowder. The other end was left open and the tube was attached to a long stick. When the powder was ignited, the rapid burning of the powder produced fire, smoke, and gas that escaped out the open end and produced a thrust.
The stick acted as a simple guidance system that kept the rocket headed in one general direction as it flew through the air. It is not clear how effective these arrows of flying fire were as weapons of destruction, but their psychological effects on the Mongols must have been formidable. Following the battle of Kai-Keng, the Mongols produced rockets of their own and may have been responsible for the spread of rockets to Europe.
All through the 13th to the 15th centuries there were reports of many rocket experiments. In England, a monk named Roger Bacon worked on improved forms of gunpowder that greatly increased the range of rockets. In France, Jean Froissart found that more accurate flights could be achieved by launching rockets through tubes. Froissart's idea was the forerunner of the modern bazooka. Joanes de Fontana of Italy designed a surface-running rocket-powered torpedo for setting enemy ships on fire.
By the 16th century rockets fell into a time of disuse as weapons of war, though they were still used for fireworks displays, and a German fireworks maker, Johann Schmidlap, invented the "step rocket," a multi-staged vehicle for lifting fireworks to higher altitudes. A large sky rocket first stage carried a smaller sky rocket second stage. When the large rocket burned out, the smaller one continued to a higher altitude before showering the sky with glowing cinders.
Schmidlap's idea is basic to all rockets today that go into outer space. Nearly all uses of rockets up to this time were for warfare or fireworks, but there is an interesting old Chinese legend that reported the use of rockets as a means of transportation. With the help of many assistants, a lesser-known Chinese official named Wan-Hu assembled a rocket- powered flying chair. Attached to the chair were two large kites, and fixed to the kites were forty- seven fire-arrow rockets.
On the day of the flight, Wan-Hu sat himself on the chair and gave the command to light the rockets. Forty-seven rocket assistants, each armed with torches, rushed forward to light the fuses. In a moment, there was a tremendous roar accompanied by billowing clouds of smoke. When the smoke cleared, Wan-Hu and his flying chair were gone. No one knows for sure what happened to Wan-Hu, but it is probable that if the event really did take place, Wan-Hu and his chair were blown to pieces.
Fire-arrows were as apt to explode as to fly. Some of these rockets were so powerful that their escaping exhaust flames bored deep holes in the ground even before lift-off. During the end of the 18th century and early into the 19th, rockets experienced a brief revival as a weapon of war. The success of Indian rocket barrages against the British in and again in caught the interest of an artillery expert, Colonel William Congreve.
Congreve set out to design rockets for use by the British military. The Congreve rockets were highly successful in battle. For example, solid rockets that were used in space programs had steel casings. The next important element of a solid rocket was the grain. The grain is the solid fuel needed to power the missile.
The first types used had gunpowder as the grain but the formula could be altered. If you ever saw a fireworks display, this is why the explosions have different colors. The additions of different metals and composites in the grain of the rockets creates this effect.
The final components; the fuse. This was the ignition device used to start the combustion process of the rockets fuel. Later as rocketry was further researched a nozzle was added to the design to better direct exhaust and improve thrust. Rockets have carried spacecraft throughout the solar system so that astronomers now have imagery of every planet as well as the dwarf planet Pluto , many moons, comets, asteroids and smaller objects.
And, because of powerful and advanced rockets, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was able to leave our solar system and reach interstellar space. Several companies in many countries now manufacture uncrewed rockets — the United States, India, Europe and Russia, to name a few — and routinely send military and civilian payloads into space.
And scientists and engineers are continually working toward developing even more sophisticated rockets. Stratolaunch, the aerospace design company backed by Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, aims to launch satellites using civilian aircraft. SpaceX and Blue Origin have also developed reusable first-stage rockets; SpaceX now has reusable Falcon 9 rockets that routinely make cargo runs to the International Space Station.
Experts predict that rockets of the future will be able to carry bigger satellites into space and may be able to carry multiple satellites at the same time, the Los Angeles Times reported. These rockets could use new composite materials, advances in electronics or even artificial intelligence to perform their work. Future rockets may also use different fuels — such as methane — that are healthier for the environment than the more traditional kerosene that is used in rockets today.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community space. Elizabeth Howell is a contributing writer for Space.
She is the author or co-author of several books on space exploration. Elizabeth holds a Ph. She also holds a bachelor of journalism degree from Carleton University in Canada, where she began her space-writing career in
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