Missiles and Rockets

Missiles and Rockets. In 1814, as the British besieged Fort McHenry at Baltimore, Francis Scott Key observed their rocket barrages; his poem describing the scene eventually became America's national anthem, making his descriptive phrase, “rockets’ red glare,” part of the nation's heritage. Later, Americans used similar solid‐powder rockets during the Mexican War and to carry life lines to stricken ships.

Advances in metallurgy and chemistry led to more powerful liquid‐propellant rockets in the twentieth century. In 1926, on his aunt's farm in Massachusetts, Robert Goddard (1882–1945), a professor of physics at Clark University, launched the first successful rocket of this type. The American Interplanetary Society (AIS, 1933) and the California Institute of Technology figured prominently in subsequent developments. AIS members formed a company, Reaction Motors, that developed many World War II production techniques and engines, which powered experimental rocket planes such as the postwar X–1 and the X–15. Caltech researchers organized the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory and established companies like Aerojet General that manufactured wartime propulsion and guidance systems. Such activities created an infrastructure that quickly absorbed the advanced wartime rocket technology developed by Germany, especially the V–2 ballistic missile. In 1945, Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) and other German experts were brought to America to continue development of military missiles and high‐altitude research rockets.

Cold War tensions led to massive expenditures for land and submarine‐based ballistic missiles. After the Soviets orbited the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, America overhauled its civilian space program, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which developed rockets to lift astronauts on a trajectory for the first lunar landing in 1969. Subsequent research enhanced military rocket boosters for warheads as well as surveillance satellites; modified versions lifted civilian weather and communications satellites. By the end of the twentieth century, the NASA space shuttle and booster rockets from the former Soviet Union were being configured to launch components of an international space station.
See also Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons; Technology.

Bibliography

Walter McDougal , The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, 1985.
Frank Winter . Rockets into Space, 1990.

Roger E. Bilstein