Chapter 3

The History of Space Travel

Babylonians

Starting around the year 3000 BC, Babylonian astrologer-astronomers began making methodical observations of the skies.

They believed that there were spirits in the heavens, and the arrangements of stars suggested animals, and some people.

For over 2000 years they recorded the movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets with respect to a fixed background of stars.

Babylonians

One thing they noticed is that throughout the year, the Sun passes through the same path with respect to the stars. (This we know today is due to the Earth traveling along the ecliptic.) The Babylonians divided the path into 12 groupings or constellations of stars. These became known as the zodiac.

Greeks

Thales of Miletus unlike the Babylonians began attempting to give non-religious, rational explanations for physical phenomena.

Aristarchus of Samos proposes that the Sun is larger than the Earth as well as that the Earth revolves around the Sun. This discovery would be ignored for over 1700 years until Copernicus expanded on it in 1514.

Chinese

Using gunpowder as fuel, the Chinese were the first to use firework rockets, the most simplistic model of a rocket, around 600 AD.

Roughly 300 years later, they adapted them to weaponry and developed the fire arrow.

Galileo (1564-1642 AD)

He’s the first to use the telescope to observe the skies. He discovers in 1610 that Jupiter has four moons and thus that not all objects revolve around Earth.

He also defends the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Galileo also discovers that the Sun rotates on its axis and that Venus like the Moon has phases.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630 AD)

By studying the observations of Mars of Tycho Brahe, Kepler derives his three laws of planetary motion: First Law: The orbits of planets are ellipses with the

Sun at one focus. Second Law: A ray directed from the Sun to a planet

sweeps out equal areas in equal times. Third Law: The square of the period of a planet's orbit

is proportional to the cube of that planet's semimajor axis.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727 AD)

In 1687, he uses his Theory of Universal Gravitation to derive Kepler’s Laws. It states that all objects that have mass attract each other. The strength of the attraction depends on the amount of mass of the objects and distance between their centers.

The book in which this is found, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, is the basics of classical physics.

Literature

Jules Verne pioneered the science fiction genre. In his novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865), he tells the story of three Americans that build an enormous sky facing cannon and ride a space ship fired from it to the moon. The mission blasts off from Florida and splashes down on the Pacific Ocean upon returning.

Literature

H. G. Wells publishes “The War of the Worlds” in 1898, a novel of a Martian invasion:

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky(1857-1935)

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but we cannot live forever in a cradle"

Russian school teacher who in 1903, without ever launching a single rocket himself, was the first to figure out all the basic equations for rocketry. From his very broad and extensive reading, including Jules Verne’s "From the Earth to the Moon", he concluded that space travel was a possibility, that it was in fact man’s destiny, and that rockets would be the way to pull it off.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

He anticipated and solved many of the problems that were going to come up for rocket powered flight and drew up several rocket designs.

He determined that liquid fuel rockets would be needed to get to space, and that the rockets would need to be built in stages (he called them "rocket trains“. He concluded that oxygen and hydrogen would be the most powerful fuels to use. He had predicted how, many years later, the Saturn V rocket would operate for the first landing of men on the moon.

Robert Goddard (1882-1945)

An American who is now called “The Father of Modern Rocketry"

By contrast to Tsiolkovsky, Goddard was the man who designed, built, and flew the rockets. He was a university professor who also developed the theory of rocketry and although he didn't know about Tsiolkovsky's work, reached the same conclusions as he did. Goddard proved the theory was true.

Robert Goddard

He launched the space age with a 10-ft. rocket in a New England cabbage field. In 1926 he launched the world’s first liquid fueled rocket. It climbed to an altitude of 41 feet, arched over, and plummeted earthward landing on the cabbage.

In the course of his experiments in Massachusetts and Roswell, New Mexico, over the next decade he virtually developed the entirety of rocket technology.

Robert Goddard

He invented everything required for modern rocketry including rockets that exceeded the speed of sound, rockets that climbed to 9,000 feet, and multistage rockets while earning over 200 patents. By himself he developed the same components and designs that took the Germans hundreds of scientists and engineers and millions of dollars to develop independently at Peenemunde during World War II.

Robert Goddard

In 1939 with a growing concern over what might be afoot in the Reich, Goddard paid a call on Army officials in Washington and brought along some films of his various rockets. He let the generals watch a few of the launches in silence, then turned to them. "We could slant it a little," he said simply, "and do some damage." The officers smiled benignly at the missile man, thanked him for his time and sent him on his way. Five years later, the first of Germany's murderous V-2 rockets blasted off for London. By 1945, more than 1,100 of them had rained down on the ruined city.

Hermann Oberth (1894-1989)

“To make available for life every place where life is possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful.” 

He independently determined the same rocketry principles as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard.

in 1929 he published "The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space", a highly influential book which was internationally acclaimed and persuaded the world that the rocket was something to take seriously as a space vehicle.

Hermann Oberth

Oberth was Wernher Von Braun’s teacher, and brought him into the German rocket program.

Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977)

Together with Oberth and an enormous team of scientists and engineers at Peenemunde, he developed and launched the German V2 rocket, the first rocket capable of reaching space.

Production of the V2 began in 1943 and were launched against London beginning in September 1944. Fortunately, the V2 offensive came too late to affect the course of the war..

Wernher Von Braun

At the end of World War II, Von Braun led the top scientists and engineers out of Germany to the Americans (he didn't want to be captured by the Russians). This single event probably determined that it would be the United States and not the Soviet Union to reach the moon first.

He led the U.S. development of military and space exploration rockets. Von Braun was crucial in the effort to convince the U.S. government to pursue a landing of men on the moon, and guided US efforts to success.

Wernher Von Braun

Von Braun would lead the development of the Jupiter rockets that sent the first American satellite into space as well as the Saturn rockets which worked so well that they were used to send the Apollo missions to the moon.