Rocket Propellants
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Rocket Propellants Various types of propellants are used to launch rockets and missiles as well as drive projectiles from guns. A "propellant" is any solid, liquid, or gas fuel used to impart motion to another object. Propellants release energy in a system, with controlled thrust; many of these same energetic materials are also used as explosives. Solid or liquid propellants undergo a rapid chemical reaction that produces gaseous products that propel another object. For centuries, this principle has been used to shoot projectiles great distances. With the invention of black powder, or gunpowder, in about the 11th century, the Chinese were the first to use rockets, primarily for pyrotechnic displays. By the year 1232, the Chinese had developed an arrow with a tube of gunpowder that could shoot fire across to an enemy army. The secret of gunpowder spread to the Arabs and Mongols, and within decades they too were using gunpowder-filled rockets in battle. In England in the middle of the 13th century, the monk Roger Bacon published the correct formula for gunpowder: a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate (saltpeter). This led, only a few decades later, to the development of the first firearms. While black powder remained the primary rocket propellant, some early rockets made use of tar, pitch, sulfur, turpentine, naphtha, petroleum, and charcoal as propellants, usually with salt or saltpeter added to make the flame burn hotter. Early in the 19th century, Sir William Congreve encouraged extensive use of rockets in the British army. His new designs used a solid charge of black powder to increase the range from 600 feet (180 meters) to 9,000 feet (2,700 meters). Congreve's rockets were first used in the Napoleonic Wars against the cities of Boulogne (1805 and 1806), Danzig (1806), and Copenhagen (1807). In the mid-1800s, nitrocellulose, nitroglycerine, and dynamite were also used in rockets for warfare. Partly spurred on by the fictional speculations of the French writer Jules Verne, theorists began to consider using rockets to journey into space. In a cell, awaiting execution for his part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Russian dissident Nikolai Ivanovitch Kibalchich drew up plans for a man-carrying rocket platform fed by gunpowder cartridges. After he was executed, guards filed his sketches in police archives, where they lay forgotten for many years. Independently, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a schoolteacher in Russia,
in 1903 proposed using reaction-propulsion power for travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere and suggested using a liquid propellant for his rockets: a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. In 1919, Robert Hutchings Goddard, a physics professor in the United States, published A Method of Reaching Extreme Al-
titudes, which established many of the major principles of modern rocketry. Goddard worked with solid propellants for several years, developing a double-base powder of 40% nitroglycerine and 60% nitrocellulose, before switching his attention to liquid propellants in 1923. In M
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