运载飞行器
运载火箭发展历史
1.Tsiolkovsky /1857~1935y./
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17, 1857, in the village of Izhevskoe in the Ryazan Province, south of Moscow. Konstantin, or Kostya for short, was fifth out of 18 children in the family. The nearly complete loss of hearing in the childhood left bright and active Konstantin Tsiolkovsky impaired for the rest of his life. At the same time, biographers agree, the disability made him turn to books and stimulated his lifelong drive for learning.
In February 1892, after 12 years of working as teacher in the small town of Borovsk, Tsiolkovsky was promoted to a new position, in the provincial capital of Kaluga. Tsiolkovsky would remain in Kaluga until his death in 1935, and it was there that he created the monumental body of work that secured his place as a prophet of the Space Age.
Tsiolkovsky died famous and respected in his native land. During the Soviet period, Tsiolkovsky was portrayed as the brilliant scientist from the Russian heartland who struggled to get recognition from the ignorant and indifferent officials of czarist Russia. However documents made public in the post-Soviet Russia revealed that Tsiolkovsky's path through the political and social cataclysms of revolutionary Russia was not as trouble-free as the official Soviet histories painted.
When mankind did in fact reach outer space, it was a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, who went first. But was it Tsiolkovsky's ideas that got him there? Despite the fact that Tsiolkovsky's theories remained largely unknown in the West for decades, his influence on the first generation of Russian space engineers is unquestionable. With the collapse of the USSR, a full and honest discussion of Tsiolkovsky's legacy, began at last. Freedom of speech in the post-Soviet Russia inevitably gave rise to the opposite extreme of the Soviet propaganda -- the effort by some Russian authors to dethrone and vilify Tsiolkovsky and his legacy.
2.Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)
Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) was one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. As a youth he became enamored with the possibilities of space exploration by reading the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and from the science fact writings of Hermann Oberth, whose 1923 classic study, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (By Rocket to Space ), prompted young von Braun to master calculus and trigonometry so he could understand the physics of rocketry. From his teenage years, von Braun had held a keen interest in space flight, becoming involved in the German rocket society, Verein fur Raumschiffarht (VfR), as early as 1929. As a means of furthering his desire to build large and capable rockets, in 1932 he went to work for the German army to develop ballistic missiles. While engaged in this work, on 27 July 1934, von Braun received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Berlin.
Von Braun is well known as the leader of what has been called the "rocket team," which developed the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II. The V-2s were manufactured at a forced labor factory called Mittelwerk. Scholars are still reassessing his role in these controversial activities.
The brainchild of von Braun's rocket team operating at a secret laboratory at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, the V-2 rocket was the immediate antecedent of those used in space exploration programs in the United States and the Soviet Union. A liquid propellant missile extending some 46 feet in length and weighing 27,000 pounds, the V-2 flew at speeds in excess of 3,500 miles per hour and delivered a 2,200 pound warhead to a target 500 miles away. First flown in October 1942, it was employed against targets in Europe beginning in September 1944. By the beginning of 1945, it was obvious to von Braun that Germany would not achieve victory against the Allies, and he began planning for the postwar era.
Before the Allied capture of the V-2 rocket complex, von Braun engineered the surrender of 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. For fifteen years after World War II, von Braun would work with the United States army in the development of ballistic missiles. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his "rocket team" were scooped up from defeated Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the United States army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun's team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the Army's Jupiter ballistic missile.
In 1960, his rocket development center transferred from the army to the newly established NASA and received a mandate to build the giant Saturn rockets. Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon.
Von Braun also became one of the most prominent spokesmen of space exploration in the United States during the 1950s. In 1970, NASA leadership asked von Braun to move to Washington, DC, to head up the strategic planning effort for the agency. He left his home in Huntsville, Alabama, but after about two years he decided to retire from NASA and to go to work for Fairchild Industries of Germantown, Maryland. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, on 16 June 1977.
3.Sergei P. Korolev (1906-1966)
Sergei P. Korolev (1906-1966) was trained in aeronautical engineering at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and, after receiving a secondary education, co-founded the Moscow rocketry organization GIRD (Gruppa Isutcheniya Reaktivnovo Dvisheniya, Group for Investigation of Reactive Motion). Like the VfR (Verein fuer Raumschiiffahrt, Society for Spaceship Travel) in Germany, and Robert H. Goddard in the United States, the Russian organizations were by the early 1930s testing liquid-fueled rockets of increasing size. In Russia, GIRD lasted only two years before the military, seeing the potential of rockets, replaced it with the RNII (Reaction Propulsion Scientific Research Institute). RNII developed a series of rocket-propelled missiles and gliders during the 1930s, culminating in Korolev's RP-318, Russia's first rocket propelled aircraft. Before the aircraft could make a rocket propelled flight, however, Korolev and other aerospace engineers were thrown into the Soviet prison system in 1937-1938 during the peak of Stalin's purges. Korolev at first spent months in transit on the Transsiberian railway and on a prison vessel at Magadan. This was followed by a year in the Kolyma gold mines, the most dreaded part of the Gulag. Stalin soon recognized the importance of aeronautical engineers in preparing for the impending war with Hitler, however, and retrieved from incarceration Korolev and other technical personnel that could help the Red Army by developing new weapons. A system of sharashkas (prison design bureaus) was set up to exploit the jailed talent. Korolev was saved by the intervention of senior aircraft designer Sergei Tupolev, himself a prisoner, who requested his services in the TsKB-39 sharashka. Following the war, Korolev was released from prison and appointed Chief Constructor for development of a long-range ballistic missile. By 1 April 1953, as Korolev was preparing for the first launch of the R-11 rocket, he received approval from the Council of Ministers for development of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the R-7. To concentrate on development of the R-7, Korolev other projects were spun off to a new design bureau in Dnepropetrovsk headed by Korolev's assistant, Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel. This was the first of several design bureaus, some later competing with Korolev, that would spinoff once Korolev had perfected a new technology. It was Korolev R-7 ICBM that launched Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957. This launch served to galvanize American concern about the capability of the Soviet Union to attack the United States with nuclear weapons using ballistic missiles. During the early 1960s, Korolev campaigned to send a Soviet cosmonaut to the Moon. Following the initial reconnaissance of the Moon by Lunas 1, 2, and 3, Korolev established three largely independent efforts aimed at achieving a Soviet lunar landing before the Americans. The first objective, met by Vostok and Voskhod, was to prove that human space flight was possible. The second objective was to develop lunar vehicles which would soft-land on the Moon's surface to insure that a cosmonaut would not sink into the dust accumulated by four billion years of meteorite impacts. The third objective, and the most difficult to achieve, was to develop a huge booster to send cosmonauts to the Moon. His design bureau began work on the N-1 launch vehicle, a counterpart to the American Saturn V, beginning in 1962. This rocket was to be capable of launching a maximum of 110,000 pounds into low-Earth orbit. Although the project continued until 1971 before cancellation, the N-1 never made a successful flight. On 14 January 1966 Sergei P. Korolev died from a botched hemorrhoid operation. See "Sergei P. Korolev," biographical file, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
