by Gurbir Singh
Congreve Junior’s commitment to the scientific approach obliged him to meticulously record his data and the conclusions he drew from them. He published three books, the first one in 1810 titled A Concise Account on the Origin and Progress of the Rocket System. Perhaps, his most significant contribution was standardised production techniques, a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Such a systematic process based on a quantified cost model controlled by a centralised state structure could not have been possible either for Tipu Sultan in India or the 14th century China. Congreve Junior’s work was a product of the European scientific Renaissance and industrial methods, modern traditions from which India was remote geographically and conceptually.
To ensure that his work did not remain purely academic, Congreve Junior calculated and recorded the cost of each type of rocket, even itemising the cost of individual items (case, cone, stick, rocket charge, carcass charge, labour and paint). The typical cost of one of the smaller rockets was just over one pound.[25] Through his father, he also had close contact with influential figures in politics, business and the establishment. Further, the British Navy, too, was upbeat and keen on maintaining its superior position post the spectacular success at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
Unlike his father, Congreve Junior had never signed up in the military. However, on that day, under cover of darkness, he participated in a night-time naval attack on the French coastal town of Boulogne. Using his newly designed launching frames, 200 of his new 24-pound rockets were fired in 30 minutes powered by gunpowder of his formulation. Although parts of the town were set on fire, the impact of the rockets was not substantial. However, this being the first instance of the tactical use of rockets in a European war, Congreve Junior could claim a significant strategic advantage.
A year later, with further technological enhancements, over 2,000 Congreve rockets bombarded Copenhagen when the British Navy captured Danish and Norwegian ships in a pre-emptive attack. In the process, “the fifth greatest naval power in Europe was annihilated profoundly.”[26] The attack was led by Arthur Wellesley; this time, he would attack with rockets, not defend against them. For this engagement, Congreve also introduced a new boat, a sloop-of-war, designed for launching rockets. The use of rockets from ships brought an additional benefit. Unlike cannons, rockets fired from a ship generated no recoil. Rockets could be fired from smaller ships without the risk of capsizing.
Even though most rockets did not hit their target, when they did, the impact was devastating. One Dane reported that a rocket went through the roof, past three floors and stuck into the side of the building.[27] The might of the British onslaught supported by the new super weapon, evoked a hitherto unknown fear terrifying the Danes into submission. Arthur Wellesley had surrounded Copenhagen in August 1807, and by the end of the first week of September, the Danish fleet surrendered. Initially, the destruction or acquisition of ships was the goal. However, as in India, Wellesley exploited every opportunity to build his personal wealth, reputation and power alongside that of the King and the country. On 21 October 1807, laden with goods looted from Copenhagen’s arsenal and 150 ships, almost the entire Danish and Norwegian fleet, Wellesley set sail for the UK.
Figure 1‑5 Congreve 32-pounder (15 kg) incendiary rocket. Credit National Air and Space Museum
Through its military victory at Srirangapatna in 1799, the UK had asserted its firm grip on India while diminishing the role of France. Buoyed by the victories in the battles of the Nile, Trafalgar and Copenhagen, the British adopted a tougher position, especially against France and French interests. By the first decade of the 19th century, the British Navy, bolstered by the deployment of its rockets, was the most powerful navy the world had known. There was not much civility or courtesy in the way the Britain wielded that power, which eventually led the US, for the first time in its history, to declare war.
With the Napoleonic Wars being fought in Europe, the British Navy employed an extreme and illegal form of conscription, tantamount to kidnapping or abduction, called impressment to increase its manpower. Young men were coerced into joining the British Navy. Force and violence invariably accompanied this form of recruitment essential for the UK to maintain its naval power and global influence. Many former Britons who had become naturalised Americans were targeted. Impressment was one of the most pressing issues for President James Madison (1751–1836) when the US declared war on Britain, and the fight continued for about two and a half years from 1812 to early 1815.
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The First Verse of the US National Anthem
Many battles during the War of 1812 involved the use of Congreve’s rockets. In one, a formidable British flotilla of HMS Ramillies, the frigate HMS Pactolus, HMS Dispatch and HMS Terror arrived off the coast of Stonington on 9 August 1814 and ordered the inhabitants to leave. They refused and fought against the barrage of shells, incendiary and Congreve rockets. The following month, Fort McHenry in Baltimore, close to Washington, came under a similar barrage. It was witnessed first-hand by a young American lawyer on one of the British ships. He was there to negotiate the release of American civilians who had been captured and was forced to stay aboard the British ships until the end of the battle. As the Sun rose on 14 September, using a telescope, he saw the flag still flying on the Fort and knew instantly that the Fort and hence Baltimore were safe. This unique encounter inspired him to write what later became the US National Anthem. The rocket referred to in the first verse of the anthem had its origin in 18th century India.
Tipu Sultan in India used his rockets to help defend and expand his kingdom. A decade and a half later, refined by Congreve, the same rockets were used by British forces in their fight to assert their dominion over the other side of the world. News of the military use of rockets in the Anglo-Mysore Wars spread across the world in the first few decades of the 19th century. In 1815, Alexander Dmitrievich Zasyadko (1779–1837) developed military rockets in Russia. He built individual rockets and platforms that could be used to launch salvos of six rockets at a time. Five years later, he was appointed the head of the Petersburg Armoury, where he established the first rocket unit of the Russian army. The R7 missile that launched Sputnik into space in 1957 can arguably be traced back to Zasyadko’s work inspired by the rocket science in India in the late 18th century.
Invented in China and Mongolia, rockets evolved gradually over centuries with incremental technological innovation in Asia, Europe and ultimately in North America. However, for almost a century following the American War of 1812, it was artillery, not rockets, that saw technological advancements. Then, the early 20th century witnessed an entirely new vision for rockets emerging from gifted writers. For the first time in human history, the confluence of scientific discovery, technological innovation and industrialisation made space exploration and human spaceflight seem more than just a dream.
Founding Fathers of Modern Rocketry
Wernher von Braun (Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun, 1912–1977) spearheaded the development of rockets that put the US in space. The day after the launch of Apollo 11 and before its landing on the Moon, he published a piece titled ‘Pioneers of a New Age’.[28] While mentioning the contribution of individuals, not just American but across the world and back in history, he also writes about the role of imagination “We sometimes too underestimate the influence of the arts on sciences (and vice versa), particularly in astronautics. It is interesting to note that the three modern rocket pioneers in astronautics …
all had something in common, in addition to their learning and passion for science. They had imaginations that were initially inspired by the fiction of Jules Gabriel Verne (1828–1905), who made space travel sound exciting and even more important technically feasible to young boys with an aptitude for science. The three pioneers he referred to were: Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskii (or Tsiolkovsky for the West, 1857–1935), Hermann Julius Oberth (1894–1989) and Robert Hutchings Goddard (1882–1945). Between them, they not only imagined the possibilities of space travel but also laid down the theoretical and engineering framework within which it could be realised.
The internal combustion engine was invented in the 19th century triggering an avalanche of inventions in the late 19th and 20th centuries. These inventions transformed agricultural communities into industrial societies, beginning with the north-west of England in the late 18th century. Its march across the world is still in progress. Inspired by the advent of new materials and technologies during the Industrial Revolution, writers conjured up powerful visions of fantastic futures. Gifted illustrators visualised the unbounded creativity of writers and helped produce spectacular images in science fiction publications, such as Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. The memory of Jules Verne was still fresh during Tsiolkovskii’s lifetime. Accomplished writers, such as H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells, 1866–1946) and William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), penned stories about the possibilities of future technology that remain popular in the 21st century. Arthur Charles Clarke (1917–2008), who first speculated about and then lived through the Space Age, was about to embark on his prodigious writing career. Around 1925 space exploration using rockets came of age in popular culture.
The decade between 1925 and 1935 saw a wave of optimism for the potential of rockets sweep across the globe. Robert Goddard, one of the pioneers mentioned in von Braun’s piece on Apollo 11 experienced first-hand through his own work the transition from science fiction to science fact. In 1932, he wrote to novelist H.G. Wells of the “deep impression” that his novel War of the Worlds had made when Goddard first read it in 1899. It directly led him to “take up the search for spaceflight.”[29] The first half of the 20th century witnessed rocketry groups, amateur and usually unfunded but dedicated, pop up around the world. The German Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Spaceflight, 1927), the American Interplanetary Society (later renamed the American Rocket Society, 1930), the Moscow-based Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD, 1931) and the British Interplanetary Society (1933) helped to propel imagination into reality.[30]
While many of the pioneers in aviation and rocketry are celebrated as national heroes and recognised globally for their achievements, there are many who made key theoretical and technological contributions that cumulatively led to the development of safe and reliable aircraft and rockets in the 21st century but have largely been forgotten. A couple of such early contributors were Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie (1881–1957) and Ary Abramovich Sternfeld (1905–1980).
Robert Esnault-Pelterie invented many elements now commonly found on aircraft, such as the aileron used by aeroplanes when turning, the speed indicator and the joystick in the cockpit for control. He was the fourth Frenchman to gain a pilot’s license. As a scientist, engineer and pilot, he published his thoughts on rocketry as early as 1912. He calculated and compared the properties of different propellants and estimated the flight times to the Moon, Venus and Mars.[31] He also proposed the concept of passive temperature control for interplanetary spacecraft.
Passive temperature control relies on surface coatings, a bright polished surface facing the Sun to reflect sunlight and minimise high temperature and a dark matt surface facing the cold blackness of space to minimise low temperature. This concept was implemented in India’s first satellites of the 1970s by Professor U.R. Rao (Udupi Ramachandra Rao, 1932-2017) and his team. The significance of Rao’s work was acknowledged by Professor Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Kovtunenko (1921-1995), designer of space technology, to have been of “immense value” to the Soviet space programme.[32]
Figure 1‑6 Robert Esnault-Pelterie 1907. Credit San Diego Air and Space Museum
Ary Sternfeld promoted the term ‘cosmonautics’ in his book Introduction to Cosmonautics[33], and long before it became a reality, he had brought the science of space travel into the mainstream, making it a respectable subject of study. In the 1974 edition of his book, he explains: the word “cosmonautics is more correct than astronautics because the definition of science studying motion in interplanetary space should provide a notion of the medium where the motion is assumed to occur (cosmos) but not one of its goals.”[34]
Though not welcomed initially when first introduced in the USSR in the 1930s, it was firmly established in the Russian language by the time Sputnik was launched in 1957, and today, cosmonautics is an internationally recognised branch of science and technology in Russian-speaking countries. In the US, Europe, India and Japan, the word ‘astronautics’ continues to dominate. Born in Poland in 1905 to Jewish parents, Sternfeld studied in France and later, at the age of 30, moved permanently to the USSR. Sternfeld survived Stalin’s purges and World War II, but he was unemployed and lived a hand-to-mouth existence for many years in the unfulfilled vision of the idealised socialist society that had brought him to the USSR.
National Space Programmes
In 1903, brothers Orville Wright (1871–1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) realised one of mankind’s most enduring dreams by designing, building and successfully flying the world’s first heavier-than-air, powered flying machine. Just 66 years later, humans landed on the Moon. Neil Alden Armstrong (1930–2012), the first man on the Moon, was 18 when Orville Wright died. They never met but could have.
Developments in rockets accelerated during World War II and continued with a stunning pace during the Cold War. Each side fearing falling behind the other invested vast amounts of financial resources and political commitment at the expense of societal development. On 4 October 1957, the USSR put the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into space. A dozen years later, the US put two men on the surface of the Moon with Apollo 11. The skill and dedication of hundreds of thousands of individuals, including engineers, technicians, pilots and politicians were essential for the success of Sputnik and Apollo 11. Yet, history remembers individuals for these monumental achievements rather than the complex nation-wide extended teams. For the USSR, it was their chief designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (1907–1966). In the US, it was Wernher von Braun; initially German, he became a US citizen in 1955. For India, it was Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai (1919–1971).
Korolev, von Braun and Sarabhai had very little in common. Despite all three being born around the same time, it was a unique journey that led each to play a key role in their respective nation’s space programme. Each made a unique contribution to the development and application of space technology to the economic and industrial development of their nation. They were very different individuals, but in one key respect, they were similar. They were building on the profound contributions to rocket science made in the first quarter of the 20th century by the “three modern rocket pioneers”[35], Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth.
Hermann Oberth was originally from Romania but made Germany his home. In 1922, his PhD thesis on space travel was rejected because it was considered outlandish and unrealistic. Oberth cast aside this criticism and published his thesis Die Rakete zu den Planetenrumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space) privately the following year. Initially controversial, the book was later a success and went on to inspire not only future rocket scientists but a wider international community of writers and filmmakers, too. It was under Oberth’s leadership that the German rocketry society Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Spaceflight) was founded in 1927. Two years later, a young rocket enthusiast Wernher von Braun joined the society. Guided by Oberth, von Braun went on to study liquid-fuel propulsion.[36] Eventually, through the violent, tumultuous ev
ents of World War II and the Cold War, von Braun would imagine, design and build the rockets that took men from Earth to the Moon.
Robert Goddard, more an experimenter than a theoretician, was probably the world’s first rocket scientist, but he died as World War II ended, the very time that rocket technology started to receive high-level political attention and funding he had sought. On 16 March 1926, during an ostensibly unimpressive flight that lasted 2.5 seconds achieving an altitude of a little over 10 m, Goddard successfully tested the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. Surprisingly, Robert Goddard’s huge technological breakthrough of designing, building and flight-testing a liquid-fuel rocket never reached the wider public. Despite his multiple attempts, neither the military nor his own government expressed any interest in the potential of his innovative rocket technology. He filed many patents, including for liquid fuel engines and multi-stage rockets, which National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) purchased in 1960 for $1 million (Rs.4.76 million)[37]
The American press at the time ridiculed Goddard’s speculation on rockets from Earth going to the Moon. An editorial in the New York Times in January 1920 questioned Goddard’s grasp of basic physics, asserting that rockets could not function in the vacuum of space. This criticism attracted a special notoriety that only came to an end when the New York Times published a correction on 17 July 1969 as Apollo 11 was on the way to the Moon.[38] Today, launch vehicles around the world use Tsiolkovskii’s principle of multi-staged rockets and incorporate liquid-fuel engines as demonstrated by Goddard.