Rocket Engine - History of Rocket Engines

History of Rocket Engines

According to the writings of the Roman Aulus Gellius, in c. 400 BC, a Greek Pythagorean named Archytas, propelled a wooden bird along wires using steam. However, it would not appear to have been powerful enough to take off under its own thrust.

The aeolipile described in the first century BC (often known as Hero's engine) essentially consists of a steam rocket on a bearing. It was created almost two millennia before the Industrial Revolution but the principles behind it were not well understood, and its full potential was not realized for a millennium.

The availability of black powder to propel projectiles was a precursor to the development of the first solid rocket. Ninth Century Chinese Taoist alchemists discovered black powder in a search for the Elixir of life; this accidental discovery led to fire arrows which were the first rocket engines to leave the ground.

Rocket engines were also brought in use by Tippu Sultan, the king of Mysore. These rockets could be of various sizes, but usually consisted of a tube of soft hammered iron about 8 in (20 cm) long and 1+1⁄₂–3 in (3.8–7.6 cm) diameter, closed at one end and strapped to a shaft of bamboo about 4 ft (120 cm) long. The iron tube acted as a combustion chamber and contained well packed black powder propellant. A rocket carrying about one pound of powder could travel almost 1,000 yards (910 m). These 'rockets', fitted with swords used to travel long distance, several meters above in air before coming down with swords edges facing the enemy. These rockets were used against British empire very effectively.

Slow development of this technology continued up to the later 19th century, when the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first talked about liquid fuelled rocket engines.

These independently became a reality thanks to Robert Goddard. Goddard also used a De Laval nozzle for the first time on a rocket, doubling the thrust and increasing the efficiency by several times.

During the late 1930s, German scientists, such as Wernher von Braun and Hellmuth Walter, investigated installing liquid-fuelled rockets in military aircraft (Heinkel He 112, He 111, He 176 and Messerschmitt Me 163).

The turbopump was first employed by German scientists in WWII. Until then cooling the nozzle was problematic, and the A4 ballistic missile used dilute alcohol for the fuel, which reduced the combustion temperature sufficiently.

Staged combustion (Замкнутая схема) was first proposed by Alexey Isaev in 1949. The first staged combustion engine was the S1.5400 used in the Soviet planetary rocket, designed by Melnikov, a former assistant to Isaev. About the same time (1959), Nikolai Kuznetsov began work on the closed cycle engine NK-9 for Korolev's orbital ICBM, GR-1. Kuznetsov later evolved that design into the NK-15 and NK-33 engines for the unsuccessful Lunar N1 rocket.

In the West, the first laboratory staged-combustion test engine was built in Germany in 1963, by Ludwig Boelkow.

Hydrogen peroxide / kerosene fuelled engines such as the British Gamma of the 1950s used a closed-cycle process (arguably not staged combustion, but that's mostly a question of semantics) by catalytically decomposing the peroxide to drive turbines before combustion with the kerosene in the combustion chamber proper. This gave the efficiency advantages of staged combustion, whilst avoiding the major engineering problems.

Liquid hydrogen engines were first successfully developed in America, the RL-10 engine first flew in 1962. Hydrogen engines were used as part of the Project Apollo; the liquid hydrogen fuel giving a rather lower stage mass and thus reducing the overall size and cost of the vehicle.

The Space Shuttle's SSME is the highest ground-launched specific impulse rocket engine to fly.