lpetrich
Contributor
Leaving our planet's atmosphere will mean not using air, so let's consider what won't need it.
At first thought, one might use a super gun. Germany's Paris Gun of 1918 could shoot its shells up to 42 km, and Project HARP's space gun once sent a projectile up 180 km.
But guns have limitations, like their projectiles having to go through the atmosphere at full speed. Guns may still be useful on airless bodies like the Moon, especially linear-motor guns like Gerard K. O'Neill's "mass drivers". They have a further limitation: they cannot do anything about the motion of their projectiles once the projectiles have departed from their barrels.
There is an alternative, something that can work in a vacuum: the rocket.
The first rockets were likely built some 1000 years in China, where gunpowder was invented. Not surprisingly, they were solid-fuel rockets, and all rockets were solid-fuel until a century ago. The first liquid-fuel rocket was flown by Robert Goddard in 1926, and by 1937, his rockets reached a record of 8 - 9 kft / 2.5 - 2.7 km.
The next big step was the development of the V-2 rocket. In 1944, one of them reached 176 km. It was launched nearly vertically, and it soon returned -- it did not go into orbit. An early two-stage rocket was made by putting a WAC Corporal rocket on top of a V-2 one. In 1949, the WAC Corporal reached an altitude of 393 km.
The first rocket to go into orbit was the Soviet Union's Sputnik 8K71PS rocket, the rocket that launched the Sputnik 1 satellite. That satellite had an orbit altitude of 215 km x 939 km -- low Earth orbit.
At first thought, one might use a super gun. Germany's Paris Gun of 1918 could shoot its shells up to 42 km, and Project HARP's space gun once sent a projectile up 180 km.
But guns have limitations, like their projectiles having to go through the atmosphere at full speed. Guns may still be useful on airless bodies like the Moon, especially linear-motor guns like Gerard K. O'Neill's "mass drivers". They have a further limitation: they cannot do anything about the motion of their projectiles once the projectiles have departed from their barrels.
There is an alternative, something that can work in a vacuum: the rocket.
The first rockets were likely built some 1000 years in China, where gunpowder was invented. Not surprisingly, they were solid-fuel rockets, and all rockets were solid-fuel until a century ago. The first liquid-fuel rocket was flown by Robert Goddard in 1926, and by 1937, his rockets reached a record of 8 - 9 kft / 2.5 - 2.7 km.
The next big step was the development of the V-2 rocket. In 1944, one of them reached 176 km. It was launched nearly vertically, and it soon returned -- it did not go into orbit. An early two-stage rocket was made by putting a WAC Corporal rocket on top of a V-2 one. In 1949, the WAC Corporal reached an altitude of 393 km.
The first rocket to go into orbit was the Soviet Union's Sputnik 8K71PS rocket, the rocket that launched the Sputnik 1 satellite. That satellite had an orbit altitude of 215 km x 939 km -- low Earth orbit.
