Page 14 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

When we look at rockets today (now called launchers), we see a highly sophisticated machine. But these launchers have been developed over a long time.
Interest in rocketry goes back many centuries, but
its practical development is only about a century old. It is curious now to look at photographs of some of the early rockets, which were simple and crude. The ones developed by Robert Goddard in America in the 1920s are typical (other centres of rocketry included the Soviet Union and Germany). What developers were trying to do was establish the scientific and technological principles, or ground rules, from which everything else would follow.
The rocket pioneers
It took huge efforts by some rocket pioneers to get rocketry under way. Three people dominated those early years— Robert H. Goddard of America (he gave his name to the Goddard Space Flight Centre), Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky of Russia, and Hermann Oberth of Germany.
Robert H. Goddard
Goddard was a research scientist (and an inventor) with a flair for technology. In 1907 he began his experiments using solid fuel. He chose to test his rocket in the basement of the physics building at Worcester Polytechnic Institute!
It was Goddard who, in 1914, also developed the idea of using liquid fuel. He built and successfully tested the first rocket using liquid fuel on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, Massachusetts. This feat was the rocketry equivalent of the first aircraft flight by the Wright brothers.
The difference between aircraft development and rocketry was that governments of the time could see many possible uses for aircraft, but none for rockets. So, at first Goddard’s ideas were ridiculed.
launcher A system of propellant tanks and rocket motors or engines designed to lift a payload into space. It may, or may not, be part of a space vehicle.
rocketry
Experimentation with rockets.
 Robert Goddard with his double acting engine rocket in 1925. This rocket has an engine that uses a separate pump for each propellant. The idea of combining both pumps into a single unit made pumps
more reliable and hence marked a significant advance in controlled rocket design.
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