The History of Sounding Rockets and Their Contribution to ... - ESA

2. Historical Background
In many areas of daily life, such as:
- global communications and information transfer
- weather, climate and environmental observation and forecasting
- remote-sensing/observation of the Universe and the surface of the Earth
- navigation of air, route and ship traffi c
- human spacefl ight,
the utilisation of space systems has become routine.
Just half a century ago, humankind began to expand its horizons by conducting missions to explore the near-
Earth-orbit environment of space. This started with sounding rockets and small scientifi c satellites designed
to investigate in-situ the Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere, which were at that time totally unexplored
regions. In addition, the fi rst observations of the Sun and stars using instruments carried by sounding rockets
operating at altitudes above the atmosphere were carried out.
The launch of the fi rst satellite, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957 by the USSR prompted the start of a space race
between the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, which culminated with the US space programme’s
landing of the fi rst human being on the Moon on 21 July 1969.
Today, space research/applications and rocket/spacefl ight technology, along with nuclear-energy exploitation
and the mastering of advanced data processing/handling, belong to those leading-edge areas of technology
that have opened up new technical, economic and sociological opportunities, and without which a modern,
industrialised country can no longer advance. Spacefl ight, rocket/space technology and associated research
have now established and proved themselves to be a valid means of improving our quality of life; they are
being relied upon to contribute to the preservation of an inhabitable Earth and the long-term survival of the
human race. This extraordinary accomplishment of the human mind over the last 50-60 years has had a more
profound infl uence on our way of life and work patterns than the public at large realises.
Rockets remain today a fundamental element of every spacefl ight programme, because they make the transportation
of instruments and human exploration in terrestrial orbit above the atmosphere and also further
away from our home planet possible.
The use of rockets as sounding rockets for the space sciences was at its most intense around 1957/58, with
activity fl ourishing around during the International Geophysical Year and extending into the early 1980s,
but still continues to this day.
2.1 Rocket history and pioneers
The early history of rocket development is closely connected with military applications. After the invention
of gunpowder (black powder) in the 13th Century by the Chinese, they used gunpowder-driven rockets for
fi reworks during celebrations, but also as military ‘fi re lances’ in their battles with the Mongols. Via India
and Arab countries, early military use of solid-fuel rockets reached Europe and the USA and they were used,
for example, in battle by Napoleon (1803-1814) and in the British-American War (1812-1814).
The idea of civil/scientifi c use of rockets to explore space emerged only towards the end of the 19th and the
beginning of the 20th Centuries, when spacefl ight pioneers like the mathematics and physics teachers Konstantin
Tsiolkowski in Russia and Hermann Oberth (author of The Rocket into Planetary Space) in Germany
proved theoretically that it actually was possible to escape the Earth and its atmosphere. They developed
independently the theoretical fundamentals of rocket fl ight into space and proposed to use liquid propellants
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