Triumph of Reason: Space Travel
  by Groff Schroeder

On February 15, the rockets of an invading army rained fire and brimstone on the city of Baghdad, helping to seal its fall. The year was 1258. For at least 200 years before that, black powder rockets were integral to Chinese military operations. When Baghdad fell in the year 2003, rockets helped to write yet another destructive chapter in the 1000-year history of rocket science.

Countless experiments show that rocket engines develop thrust as the closed end of a tube directs rapidly expanding exothermic chemical combustion products out the open end of the tube. When the superheated gasses pass through a narrowed region called the nozzle, the Bernoulli Effect can increase their speed to supersonic velocities. Rockets move because of the reaction principle, a specific case of Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion from his brilliant 1687 book, The Principia. Most people learned this law in public school as “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Unlike jet engines in which a burning fuel drives a turbine that turns a fan and accelerates air, rockets can provide thrust above the atmosphere and can achieve and leave earth’s orbit.

On October 3, 1942, a machine made by humans first entered space. The vehicle was an A-4 liquid fuel rocket created by German physicist Werner von Braun. The German military funded von Braun’s experiments, and Adolph Hitler called the rocket the vengeance weapon two or V-2. While von Braun recognized the rocket’s capability for space exploration, Hitler’s vision for the rocket, like countless combatants before him, revolved around their ability to kill and destroy. During the next two years, about 2,900 more rockets would pass through space, each delivering a 1000-kilogram (one ton) payload of high explosives to the cities of England, Belgium and France upon their return to earth.


As with faith, reason and morality are not inextricably linked. Just as religious fervor can rationalize things forbidden by religious teachings such as the industrialized murder of war, experiment, science and engineering can yield horrific weapons and torture devices just as easily as they can cure disease or provide cool electronic gadgets.

 


As the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in the early 1960s relentlessly thawed the world’s “Cold War,” United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy offered the world an alternative. Kennedy proposed that the international race to build rockets to rain nuclear bombs on people living on the surface of the earth instead become an international race to build rockets to deliver people to the surface of the moon. Sadly, Kennedy saw only the earliest fruits of this new paradigm for rocket science and international rivalry. However, his vision of peaceful uses for rockets opened the door to space exploration, revealing the stunning beauty of the universe and providing our nation with great scientific knowledge and spectacular engineering accomplishments, most recently demonstrating the existence of water on the planet Mars with twin robotic rovers.

In the 1000 years since its invention, the rocket has propelled probably millions of explosive payloads designed to kill, maim and destroy. In a much smaller number of flights, humans have employed rocket payloads to learn about and explore the vast and dangerous universe surrounding our fragile planet. Like so much of our technology, rockets have the power to destroy or create. Rockets can deliver enlightenment or destruction, but only science can deliver rockets.

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