Missiles descend from rocket-powered arrows flown in tenth-century China
Chinese archers were strapping rockets to arrows by the 10th century. Iron-cased rockets from Mysore and the Maratha Empire later inspired Britain's Congreve rocket, and today's guided missiles still rely on the same basic idea: self-propelled flight, now steered by onboard systems toward a chosen target.
The word comes from the Latin missilis, that may be thrown, and first appeared in English in the early 1600s in the writing of Philemon Holland. Originally it meant any thrown or shot projectile. Modern usage reserves it for self-propelled weapons guided to a target; unguided rocket weapons count as rocket artillery, and unpowered explosives are shells when fired from guns and bombs when dropped from aircraft.
Before modern rocketry, rocket weapons were used in China, Korea, India and Europe. In the early 20th century Robert Goddard in the United States and Hermann Oberth in Germany built early rockets, and the Soviet Gas Dynamics Laboratory developed solid-fuel designs in the 1920s. Germany's V-1 and V-2 of World War II, held on course by mechanical autopilots, were the first missiles used operationally, alongside a few radio-controlled anti-ship and anti-aircraft types built in small numbers.
A missile combines targeting, guidance, flight control, an engine and a warhead. Guidance tracks the target, computes a course and steers via thrust vectoring or fins, wings and canards, often with different methods for launch, mid-course and final approach. Active homing missiles carry their own transmitter; semi-active ones follow energy reflected from a target illuminated by the launching ship or aircraft; passive ones rely solely on signals from the target. Inertial units built from gyroscopes and accelerometers, or satellite positioning, help too.
Solid propellants are easier to store and allow rapid launch, while larger missiles may burn liquid fuel, and hybrids pair a solid fuel with a liquid oxidiser. Cruise missiles usually use turbojets for their simplicity and small frontal area. Voluntary arrangements such as the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime, joined by more than 140 countries in total alongside a 2002 code of conduct, aim to curb the spread of long-range missiles.
Source: Missile
