Our ancestors began exploring space in their imagination thousands of years before they had the wherewithal to travel in space, or indeed had any concept about what space was like. As early as the second century AD, the Greek writer Lucian, in his book 'True Histories' wrote of sailors being whisked to the Moon by a waterspout.
In the 1600s the Moon was also the destination of English Bishop Goodwin's hero in his book 'Man in the Moon', who travelled there in a chariot drawn by swans. At much the same time the noted French writer and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac advised erstwhile space travellers to attach to themselves bottles of dew. When the Sun rose, the dew would evaporate, taking the travellers with it.
In the 19th century the English astronomer Sir John Herschel was convinced that the Moon was inhabited.
In the 19th century also Jules Verne in France and H. G. Wells in England became masters of space fiction. In his book 'From the Earth to the Moon' Verne shot his heroes to the Moon in a projectile fired from a giant cannon. Prophetically, he did so from a site in Florida, close to where the Apollo astronauts would start their Moon shots a century later.
The heroes in Wells's book 'First Men in the Moon' utilized an ingenious anti-gravity material called cavorite on their spaceship to propel them through space. Exposing the material to the Earth blocked the Earth's gravity, and allowed the Moon's gravity pull them towards it.
Of course, none of these weird and ingenious methods of space propulsion would work in the real world. Perhaps strangely, the writers had overlooked a method of propulsion that alrady existed and that would work in space. That method was the rocket.
The rocket has been around since at least the 1200s, when the Chinese used it to spread terror when fighting the Mongols. Over the centuries following, rockets were used occasionally in warfare in Europe. But the rocket did not become an effective weapon until the early 1800s, when English colonel William Congreve introduced improved designs. Soon every major European army had their own rocket squadron, including the Russians.
In the 1860s a Russian boy avidly followed the exploits of the Russian rocket squadrons, and developed a passion for rocketry that would obsess him for the rest of his life. He was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a visionary who saw how rockets could be used for space propulsion and who went on to lay down many of the principles on which space flight depends. Well is he regarded as the 'father of astronautics'.
Tsiolkovsky was not a practical man, and did not build any rockets, let alone spacecraft. And his work remained virtually unknown outside his native land for decades.
Modern rocket technology, as opposed to theory, has its origins in the USA, in the work of Robert Goddard. Like so many, he was inspired to thoughts of space travel by the works of Verne and Wells. And, like Tsiolkovsky, he realised that rockets held the key to space propulsion. In March 1926 he fired off the world's first liquid-propellant rocket, the type that would eventually carry satellites into orbit and dispatch probes to the most distant planets.
A year later rocket enthusiasts in Germany formed a society to promote rocketry and space travel, called Verein fur Raumschiffart, or VfR. One of the founder members was Hermann Oberth, known for his seminal work on space travel 'The Rocket into Interplanetary Space'.
The VfR bench-tested their first liquid-propellant rocket in 1930. Called the Kegelduese, or 'cone motor', it used the same propellants as Goddard's rocket, petrol and liquid oxygen. Assisting in this test was one Wernher von Braun, who had recently joined the Vfr.
The Vfr's next project was a rocket called Minimum-Rakete, or Mirak. Several versions of the Mirak were fired over the next two years, along with another design called the Repulsor. They were nose-driven, with their motor placed forward in the nose. Firings of the Miraks and the Repulsors took place at the so-called Raketenflugplatz, or 'rocket flying field', in a Berlin suburb.
In July 1932 the VfR staged a demonstration rocket flight before the Army at the Kummersdorf proving ground, in the hope of getting financial support for research. Their Mirak II rocket reached an altitude of some 60 metres. The demonstration did nothing for the VfR, which soon disbanded. But it led to the Army engaging von Braun to develop liquid-propellant rockets for them.
Meanwhile, in Russia, rocket developments were also progressing apace. MosGIRD, a Moscow group studying the principles of rocket engines, flew its first rocket, GIRD 09, in August 1932. It used jellified petrol and liquid oxygen as propellants. The following November GIRD X was launched, this time using ethanol (ethyl alcohol) as fuel. Director of the group at this time was one Sergei Korolev, who was to become the 'Chief Designer' of Soviet space rockets and spacecraft.
Back at Kummersdorf in Germany von Braun's team were also building alcohol-fuelled rockets. The first design A-1 (A standing for 'Aggregate') was not successful. Two of the modified A-2s, however, were successfully fired from Borkum, an island in the North Sea, in December 1934.
The A-2 gave way to the improved A-3, on which work began in 1935. Two years later von Braun and his team moved to the Baltic island of Peenemunde, which had the extra space they needed. It was also suitably remote for the secrecy surrounding the development of what was now clearly intended as a weapon of war. Flight tests of the A-3 began in autumn 1937.
A year later the A-5 was successfully fired. It was an intermediate design built primarily to test systems to be used in the A-4, a practical missile capable of delivering a high- explosive warhead for several hundred kilometres. For the first test flights the A-5s were not fitted with a guidance system. The first gyro-controlled flight took place in autumn 1939 at the outbreak of World War 2. It was an outstanding success, and the rocket was recovered afterwards. Some 25 such launches were made over the next two years, with the rockets rising to heights of up to 13 km.
Success with the A-5s paved the way for the A-4. The first successful flight of this new rocket took place in October 1942, after two previous attempts in June and August. And only a month later, the A-4 was put into production. In 1943 Peenemunde was bombed by the Allies, and production of the A-4 continued at an underground site in Germany called Mittelwerk. It came to be known as the V-2, being the second of Hitler's revenge (vergeltungswaffe) weapons.
In 1944 and 1945 some 1,200 V-2s were launched against Antwerp and London, delivering their deadly high-explosive payload at a speed of 5,000 kilometres an hour. These devastating weapons killed an estimated 2,500 people.
During the last days of the war von Braun surrendered to the US Army, and with other members of his team and captured V-2s was transferred in 1946 to the Army's White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They continued their rocket research work and in February 1949 fired the first multistage, or step rocket. Called Bumper, the launcher had for its first stage a V-2 and for its second a WAC Corporal. The last flights in the Bumper series took place at a new launch site - Cape Canaveral in Florida.
In a like manner the Russians took other German rocket experts and captured V-2s to Russia. Chief Designer Korolev directed test firings of V-2s and rockets developed from them from a launch site at Kapustin Yar near Volgograd. This led ultimately to the development of the SS-6, or Sapwood, the world's first ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile).
In October 1957 it was a modified Sapwood that launched the world into the Space Age by putting into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. This was the first of the A series launch vehicles, designated the A, or SL-1.
Von Braun's team had also been developing a launch vehicle capable of launching satellites, called the Jupiter C or Juno 1. And it was this rocket that thrust the USA into the Space Age in January 1958, launching the first US satellite, Explorer 1.
