The first rockets were fireworks invented by the Chinese. They were very similar to the ones we fire today at Halloween and on 5 November. These were powered by various mixtures of gunpowder.

On 18 February 1808 the Breeches Buoy was first used to rescue seven seamen from the sailing ship Elizabeth off Great Yarmouth. A rocket, trailing a line, was fired from the shore to the stricken ship, and the sailors pulled to safety.

Gunpowder rockets were never going to be powerful enough to carry heavy loads or to travel great distance. The first rocket powered by liquid fuel was launched in March 1926 by Robert Hutchings Goddard at Auburn, Massachusetts. Goddard’s first rocket reached a height of 12.5m. By 1935 his rockets could fly to a height of 2,200kms at speeds of 885km/h. See the History section for more information on Goddard and other Space Pioneers.

During the Second World War the Germans developed rockets with explosive warheads. The V1 and V2 rocket weapons attacked London in 1944. Rocket aircraft were also used to attack bombers.

It was in the 1950s and 1960s that rocket science really developed. The Cold War between the USA and the USSR created a Space Race. The USSR was first to successfully launch a satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957, and to put a man into space, Yuri Gargarin in 1961; and the USA was first to land a man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, in 1969. Both sides threatened each other with destruction from large numbers of rockets with atomic bombs – intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The most powerful rocket ever built is the Saturn V rocket developed for the American moon programme. It weighs 3000tonnes, is as tall as a 30-storey building and produces about 4,000,000 kg of thrust (roughly the equivalent of 50 jumbo jets). This huge amount of power is necessary to lift the combined weight of the rocket and its payload at a fast enough speed to overcome the effects of Earth’s gravity. This speed, known as Escape Velocity, is 11.2km per second. This is about 28,000 km/h – 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet.

Nowadays, rockets regularly carry satellites into space, satellites that we use for weather forecasting, for telephone communications, for broadcasting and for conducting all sorts of surveys of our planet and of space itself.