Uses of Rockets—From Military Artillary to Space Travel

Rockets were used in warfare by the Chinese, who invented black powder, more than 2000 years ago. They were the first artillery pieces. Even after the invention of the canon, rockets continued to be used as artillery. In the Revolutionary War, the British attacked forts from the sea with rockets. In the War Between the States, rockets were used primarily as means of signaling, but some artillery rockets—very primitive ones—were used by both Union and Confederate troops.

It was not until WWII that rockets began to be used extensively in warfare. At first, they were used as air launched powered bombs to attack ground targets. Towards the end of the war, they became more powerful, and development began on air-to-air rockets for aerial combat.

Of course, the major advance in rocket use in WWII was Germany’s development of the V2, the world’s first ballistic missile.

But the V2 was not Germany’s only use of rockets. It also flew the world’s first rocket powered aircraft—the ME-163. This stubby fighter caused dismay within our bomber fleets. It would dive through them at nearly 500 mph, firing its canon continuously, and be gone before the crews could react.

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Fortunately, the rocket plane used most of its fuel on takeoff, and could make just one pass through a bomber formation before heading back to base for a gliding landing on a skid. But the concept would be resurrected for research craft when the U.S. began assaulting the sound barrier.

After WWII, the V2 was used in the U.S. for upper atmospheric research, as a sounding rocket. It gave rise to a home grown sounding rocket, the Viking. At the same time, another, smaller sounding rocket was developed, the Aerobee.

Sounding rockets were used to determine the makeup of the upper atmosphere. At the time, we had no real idea of what the atmosphere above 50,000 feet was like, or even how far it extended above the surface of the planet.

The sounding rockets also carried instruments that gave us brief glimpses of the Sun. This began giving us our first clues as some of the secrets of our star.

Since those early years, new sounding rockets have been developed. There is still much we need to learn about our envelope of air, and universities around the globe are using these new rockets to sample various layers of our blanket of life.

As jet aircraft flew faster and faster, they began experiencing strange phenomena. Especially in dives, the controls would reverse. Pulling back on the stick wouldn’t cause the plane to pitch up; it caused it to pitch down—disastrous in a dive. And the aircraft would begin to shake violently as its speed reached about 680 mph. Even more concerning, the wings began to lose lift.

Aeronautical engineers were certain all this was due to aircraft approaching the speed of sound—the so called sound barrier—750 mph at sea level, or in technical terms Mach 1. Our jets were not powerful enough at the time—1947—to assail this mythical barrier. Only rockets could.

Aircraft designers developed a rocket powered plane designed to break through the sound barrier—the X-1. Having learned from the ME-163’s fuel situation, the X-1 rocket plane was designed to be flown aloft and dropped from the bomb bay of a B-29 bomber.

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The little rocket plane, flown by legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, became the first craft to fly faster than the speed of sound.

The flights of the X-1 taught aeronautical engineers much about supersonic flight. So much that the next rocket plane, the X-2, had swept wings. The X-1 had straight wings. The reason wings lost lift as a plane approached Mach 1 was the air molecules cannot get out of the way fast enough and so build up in front of the wing, rather than flowing over it to generate lift. This also causes the severe vibration and the control reversal.

Swept wings overcome some of these problems because the air molecules have a chance to move out of the way as portions of the wing slice through.

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