THE PIONEERS OF SPACE
Greetings to the entire steemit community, this time I want to talk about the people responsible for the technological advance we have today, specifically in the space field. I am going to name the men who made the conquest of space possible, and with it, the technological growth of humanity.
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Among the dreams that have impelled the progress of the human being in the technological field, among many others, the desire to know other worlds stands out.
This impulse, which throughout the history of humanity has been channeled through the discovery and conquest of other continents, from remote and unexplored regions, has found an expression of technological character in our days; the conquest of space.
Today no one doubts the importance of space research for life on earth, and these would be impossible without a machine called a rocket.
Basically, a rocket is nothing more than a cylinder, open at one end and filled with a combustible substance. The propulsion is possible thanks to the rapid combustion of said substance.
The rocket advances due to the principle of action-reaction formulated by Isaac Newton in his theory of universal gravitation, which affirms that any action is opposed by a reaction of equal magnitude and in the opposite direction.
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Next I will name the characters that most influenced the development of the rocket.
K. E. ZIOLKOVSKI (1857-1935)
In 1880, Ziolkovski, who worked as a school teacher, began a deep study of rockets, which convinced him that they were the only vehicles capable of allowing access to space.
His theoretical work led him in 1903 that the best rocket for his purposes was the liquid fuel and proposed an ideal mixture based on oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
In addition to proposing the use of rockets formed by various stages, he developed the formula that allows to calculate the final speed of the rocket from the output speed of the jet gases, thanks to this, in 1917 he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
ROBERT H. GODDARD
Professor of physics at Clark University, Massachusetts, he was the first person to build and test a liquid fuel rocket. Like Ziolkovski, he began studying gunpowder rockets, but from 1917 he devoted himself entirely to the development of devices propelled by liquid propellant.
Thanks to his work, on March 16, 1926 he managed to get a rocket propelled by gasoline and liquid oxygen to fly up to 12m high and at a speed of 90km / h.
The last rockets built by him, around 1935, already had all the organs that form these mills at present and reached altitudes of up to 2200 m at speeds of almost 900 km /h.
HERMANN OBERTH (1894-1989)
Professor of physics and mathematics, he was passionate about the topic of space flights, to which he devoted his doctoral thesis. He is considered as the inspirer of the German works on rockets and as one of the pioneers of astronautics.
He was the soul of the German Society for Space Navigation. In addition to his research work, carried out in part in the United States, from 1955 and in collaboration with Von Braun, was one of the most active promoters of astronautics and the idea of space conquest.
R. ESNAULT-PELTERIE
French engineer, author of several capital inventions in the field of aeronautics and one of the main proponents of the possibilities of astronautics.
He carried out an active campaign in favor of this new discipline, which he helped baptize by imposing the name created by one of his followers (J. H. Rosny).
Between his works they emphasize: The exploration of the high atmosphere with rockets and the possibility of the interplanetary trips in 1927 and the astronautics in 1930.
SERGEI P. KOROLEV (1907-1966)
Pioneer of Russian astronautics, he focused his research on the creation and development of rocket engines.
After his activities as an amateur, in 1930 he began to work regularly on this subject and three years later, he developed the first liquid propellant rockets of the USSR.
During the Second World War he devoted himself to the creation of self-propelled weapons and at the end of the war, he was responsible for the development of the arsenal of Soviet long-range rockets.
WERNHER VON BRAUN (1912-1977)
German engineer, since very young showed great interest in the rockets, collaborated with Hermann Oberth in the German Society for Space Navigation, and later, under the command of Dornberger, he worked in the facilities of the German army, where he directed the creation and development of the first modern operating rocket, the V-2, first successfully launched on October 3, 1942, entered service against the allies in 1944.
A year later, defeated Germany, Von Braun went to work in the service of the United States.
There he tested the V-2 captured by the Americans in Europe and developed several rockets.
The space launch of spacecraft of the Sputnik series by the Soviets and the failures of the Vanguard rockets developed by other American teams, allowed Von Braun to take the lead of the United States Astronautics with its Jupiter C rocket .
From then on, he devoted himself basically to the civil applications of rockets, becoming the soul of the construction of the Saturn V rocket, protagonist of the Apollo project that would take the first men to the lunar surface. He held several management positions at NASA, until in 1972 he moved to private industry.
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Reference
Great Interactive Encyclopedia Siglo XXI. OCEANO editions