dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (09/20/84)
Satellites and people can go into space because rockets take them there. More on the early history of our basic transportation off the Earth -- after this. September 13 The Rocket's Red Glare On today's date in the year 1814 a young poet watched the British bombard a fort near Baltimore. Ispired by the sight, Francis Scott Key later wrote "The Star Spangled Banner" -- which contains the phrase, "the rocket's red glare". The rockets our national anthem refers to were the creation of Sir William Congreve, the foremost expert of his time in military rockets. Congreve's interest in rockets was triggered by their use against the British in India. Congreve didn't witness these rocket attacks -- but he read everything he could on the subject -- then experimented and improved on what he had learned. Long before Congreve's time, rockets had already been known and used in Europe. The Europeans learned about them from the Arabs, who had found out about rockets from the Chinese. The use of rockets in China is not so ancient as once thought -- the earliest Chinese reference to the use of "flying arrows of fire" is from around the year 1232. Less than a century later Europeans already knew the recipe for making gunpower -- the fuel of these very early rockets. Our present-day rockets use the same principles of propulsion as the Chinese fireworks of centuries ago. And a red glare trails behind each rocket as it leaves the launchpad. But aboard our modern flaming arrows -- satellites, interplanetary spacecraft, and people are carried off the face of the Earth -- and into space. Script by Diana Hadley (c) Copyright 1983, 1984 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin