Rocket Pioneers

Suppose you took a cannon up to the top of a very high mountain. Once there you shoot off a cannonball in a horizontal direction.

Now provided you fired the ball with a high enough velocity, the ball should travel around the Earth (without crashing on some unsuspecting person!) back to your mountaintop position again!!

This experiment was suggested by the great scientist Sir Issac Newton (1643-1727). However, it took nearly three hundred years for his idea to become real with the launch of the first artificial satellite.

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