Solid Fuel Rockets

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The solid fuel rocket has assisted life today in many ways. Such as sending us to the moon, being used for fireworks, and for aiding us in warfare. Solid fuel rockets were invented in the 18th century in Dutch for warfare. Solid fuel rockets as weapons came to Europe when an overwhelmingly superior British force in India was defeated by an Indian rocket corps in the 1700s. The British were very impressed, and decided to develop rockets of their own to supplement their artillery. William Congreve designed several types of rocket for the British army, utilizing solid potassium nitrate based fuel. Congreve's rockets used a stabilizing stick about 4 feet long, or like a large bottle rocket. It was made of an iron casing filled with propellant, 6 or 12 inches in diameter. They could be launched from specially modified ships for shore bombardment or from the ground on launching rails. Experimenters and scientists in Germany and Russia began working with rockets with a mass of more than 45 kilograms. Some of these were so powerful that their escaping exhaust flames bored deep holes in the ground even before lift-off. So William Congreve wanted to become a competitor to the two German and Russian scientists. Even with Congreve's work, scientists had not improved the accuracy of rockets much from the early days of the solid fuel rockets. In the mid to late 18th century militaries need another and quicker way to take position of the wars that they were fighting in. Such as in the War of 1812 when the rockets where being used by British ships to pound Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. They didn’t use rockets to go to space because they knew slim to nothing about space in the 18th century and the rockets were simply too small to fly into space and they did not enough fuel to make into space and back. The solid fuel rocket has impacted the world today by sending us to

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