Tous sur orbite
Space rocket? Do you mean launcher?
You always have to imagine something before you build it. You are probably thinking of something along the lines of Tintin's rocket, in which he and his companions went to the moon. The idea that to reach the stars or to send objects into space would require an extremely powerful machine, capable of travelling very fast and using some special means of propulsion, has been around for a long time. We often call such things “rockets”, but, in fact, “rocket” is not a very precise term. In the world of space we talk about launchers.
A bit of history
The problem with outer space is all that space - there is nothing up there! What can you push against in order to go forward? The propellers on an aeroplane push against the air, when you row a boat you push against the water, but in space there’s no air, there’s nothing at all. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Russian, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky found the solution by proposing an idea for a rocket engine capable of creating its own propelling force in the atmosphere (where there is air) and also in the vacuum of space. It was the military, in particular the Germans, with Werner Von Braun’s famous “V2”, who were to take up this technology. In this context we talk about “missiles”. After the war, the American s and Russians took over development of the technology and, in 1957, Soyuz, the historic Russian launcher, sent Sputnik, the first satellite, into space…
Password “launcher”
Without launchers there would never have been any satellites and the conquest of space would never have got off the ground. Launchers are the key to reaching outer space. This was why it was important for the major powers to have their own launchers, rather than depending on the two historical super-powers of America and Russia. This was to lead Europe, in 1973, to launch the Ariane program. Since then, the geopolitical objectives have been joined by massive commercial interests, as more and more satellites are sent into space.
