The launch countdown was invented for a 1929 German science fiction film
Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon, released in 1929, showed a multistage rocket rolled slowly to an upright launch pad while a clock ticked down to liftoff. Neither the pad nor the countdown existed yet. Its scientific adviser, Hermann Oberth, later worked on the V-2, and the Nazis banned the film as too revealing.
Rockets themselves are far older. Gunpowder rockets appeared in Song dynasty China by the 13th century; a firework called the ground-rat reportedly startled Empress-Mother Gongsheng at a banquet in 1264, and a 14th-century manual by Jiao Yu describes the first known multistage rocket. Mongol conquests carried the idea west. The Syrian writer Hasan al-Rammah listed 22 rocket recipes among 107 for gunpowder, and the word itself comes from the Italian for a little bobbin, after the shape.
Iron casings came from the Kingdom of Mysore in India in the late 18th century. William Congreve copied the design for Britain in 1804, and those were the rockets whose red glare Francis Scott Key saw over Fort McHenry in 1814. Between them, the Mysorean and British versions stretched rocket range from about 100 yards to 2,000.
Spaceflight took shape on paper first. William Leitch proposed rocket travel through space in an 1861 essay, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky built out the theory from 1903. The practical leap came in 1926, when Robert Goddard attached a de Laval nozzle to a high-pressure combustion chamber and burned liquid propellant rather than powder. The nozzle more than doubled the thrust and raised efficiency from 2 percent to 64. On 20 June 1944 a V-2 became the first human-made object to cross the edge of space, built partly with slave labour, a cost historians emphasise.
After the war the United States brought Wernher von Braun and other German engineers across the Atlantic, while Sergei Korolev led Soviet work. A generation on, the Saturn V launched the equipment for the first crewed Moon landing in 1969.
Source: Rocket
