Out of this World : Rocket Pioneers

Robert H. Goddard is known as the ``Father of the Space Age''. He was the first person to invent a rocket engine that used a liquid fuel (made of hydrogen and oxygen) to power it.

Goddard worked for seventeen years to develop his rocket design. Then on 16th March 1926, at his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, USA, Robert Goddard's machine was launched sucessfully.

He wrote in his diary the next day,

It looked almost magical as [the rocket] rose ... as if it said
``I've been here long enough; I think I'll be going somewhere
else if you don't mind''

Goddard's (and basically all rockets since then) worked by blasting out a huge amount of material from its engine VERY QUICKLY!!. This pushes the rocket up at tremendous speeds.

About ten years after Goddard's death, Sergi Korolev started to build powerful rockets for the Russian Space Programme. In 1957, he launched the first ever artificial satellite called Sputnik-1.

But what sort of speeds do we need to get into space?