Under present conditions, the author of any paper on rocket power plant engineering must inevitably apologise for a certain reticence as regards technical details, which is imposed by security requirements. These arise from the important applications of rocket propulsion for guided weapons and other military purposes, and are less stringent in regard to its use as a means for providing take-off assistance. It is with the latter subject that this paper will be mainly concerned when practical applications are discussed.Most of the fundamentals are common to all uses of the rocket motor and it is hoped that a general survey of these may be of some value, especially since the field of rocketry has been relatively neglected in the technical publications of this country.
The Royal Aeronautical Society is now 102 years old, and astronautics has already existed as a technical discipline for some 70 of these years, even if one disregards its long pre-history of mythology, science-fiction, and vague speculation. Tsiolkovsky began to make his amazing and entirely serious scientific contributions just before the dawn of the twentieth century.
This suggestion that aeronautics and astronautics are much of an age would surprise many laymen, who are apt to accept literally the dating of the popular Press; this usually argues that the “Space Age” began with the launching of Sputnik I in 1957, disregarding even the first successful large rocket, the V2, which flew 15 years before Sputnik I. However, whether one argues that astronautics is already a septuagenarian, is in its vigorous and youthful twenties, or is not yet even a teenager, one must admit that its amazing development has occurred mostly in the last decade.
Few aeronautical engineers would disagree that the development of new propulsive systems has been the main influence responsible for the achievement of supersonic flight. This is not the same thing as claiming that sustained flight at these speeds, over fairly long ranges and with reasonable economy, would ever be possible without correspondingly large contributions from the aerodynamicist, the structural engineer, and the designers of various equipment. However, if we had been limited for all time to the piston engine/ propeller power plant almost universally employed juring the first 40 years of heavier-than-air flight, it is unlikely that we should ever have exceeded a Mach number of one.
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