These days, rockets all more or less look alike.
Sure, some are bigger.
Some are smaller.
But pretty much all have a cone-shaped nose at the top…
a big tube holding fuel and the rest of the propulsion system underneath...
maybe some fins at the bottom if you’re feelin’ fancy.
But the thing is, you don’t have to set your rocket up that way to fly.
We know that because the first modern one looked really different.
In 1926, a rocket called Nell blasted off from a Massachusetts farm.
And while it wasn’t bound for space, it introduced many of the fundamentals
of rocket science that would ultimately get us into orbit and beyond.
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Nell was by no means the first rocket to ever launch.
Not by a long shot.
Rockets had been around in some form for over a millennium, when the Chinese
started packing gunpowder into bamboo or paper tubes to make fireworks.
By the 13th century, they’d even made rocket-powered arrows for warfare.
But by the early 20th century,
these gunpowder-fueled rockets hadn’t evolved into spacecraft.
Despite the musings of science fiction writers.
For one thing, they were hugely inefficient.
When the powder was ignited, only like 2% of the energy that’s released
actually went into thrusting the rocket up, up and away.
So getting something beyond the stratosphere wasn’t really on the table.
And even if a rocket could get that high,
it wasn’t common knowledge that it could work in the vacuum of space.
After all, all our other flying vessels needed air to move through.
But a physicist named Robert Goddard
dreamed of a rocket that could reach the Moon and Mars.
And he knew rockets could work without air…so he got down to business.
As early as 1907, he was tinkering around
with rockets that used gunpowder and other solid fuels.
And over the years, he managed to improve their efficiency by over 3000%!
But getting to orbit would take more than that.
So he thought outside the box.
His Space Age future would rely on liquid-fuel rockets, instead.
Compared to their solid counterparts, liquid fuels are more energy dense.
For the same mass of fuel, more energy is released when they burn.
They’re better at creating thrust for the same amount of mass, too.
Essentially, you get more bang for your buck.
But switching to liquid fuels does make for a more complicated setup.
You can’t just pour gasoline into a piece of bamboo and set it on fire.
In any rocket, you need to combine two types of chemicals, or propellants.
One is the fuel.
The other is the oxidizer that provides a bunch of oxygen
for the fuel to react with and release that rocket-launching energy.
And to get the most efficient reaction possible,
those propellants need to be combined in just the right proportions.
In solid fuel rockets, you can mix them together and pack that mixture
into one big chamber before launch and be confident they’ll stay that way.
They’re solid.
Liquids, on the other hand, move.
Which means you can’t stir them together and hope they’ll stay perfectly mixed.
So you need at least two separate chambers to store each propellant.
Then you need another chamber where they can actually meet up and combust.
And don’t forget all the plumbing that has to not only connect all those different
pieces together, but steadily deliver the right amounts of each propellant, too.
So it took some trial and error, but eventually Goddard created Nell.
There it is.
Looks a bit flimsy, doesn’t it?
And a bit naked, with all of its inner parts exposed.
Probably not going to see a modern rocket rocking that look any time soon.
And that frame that looks like it holds it up?
That’s only kinda a frame.
It’s also the plumbing that pumps Nell’s propellants around.
And if you look closer, you might notice that Nell
has a few components in some unconventional places.
Those tanks at the bottom are for the propellants.
Goddard used gasoline as the fuel and liquid oxygen as the oxidizer.
Modern liquid rockets still use liquid oxygen,
but the fuel has varied both over the years and from rocket to rocket.
Meanwhile, this chamber up at the top is the combustion chamber,
where the propellants get mixed together.
There’s an igniter sitting on top to, as the name implies, make them ignite.
In many modern rockets, that would involve some kind of spark plug,
but Nell had a bunch of match heads that were set on fire
by Goddard’s assistant holding a blowtorch on the end of a long pole.
Not exactly an ideal set-up by today’s standards, but hey.
Goddard was developing the very first liquid rocket.
He was working with what he had.
A combustion chamber sitting at the top of a rocket
might seem a little weird to those of us who are used to rockets
storing their spacecraft or human cargo up there,
but perhaps the most unusual part of this configuration
can be found just under the combustion chamber:
The nozzle that speeds up the flow of the exhaust
and gives the rocket more oomph.
Yeah, the exhaust is coming out in the middle of the rocket, above the oxygen tank.
Goddard even had to stick a small asbestos heat shield on top of the tank
to protect it from getting too hot!
But he had a method to his apparent madness.
He wanted to keep the flame responsible for combusting the fuel
as far away from propellant tanks as possible.
With nearly a century of hindsight, Goddard’s design might look a little janky to us,
but each of his solutions came together on the launchpad.
Nell blasted off on March 16, 1926.
It used up its fuel in under three seconds, climbing about 12.5 meters into the air.
And without a parachute, it came crashing down about 56 meters away.
Not exactly Mars-bound.
But much like the Wright Brothers’ first flight, it was absolutely historic.
Nell showed that liquid-fuel rockets worked,
and up until his death in 1945, Goddard kept refining the design.
He rearranged some parts, developed more sophisticated pumping systems,
added in stabilizers, and made them steerable.
And these new models did start to look a lot more like modern rockets.
But technically, we can’t draw a straight line
between Nell and NASA’s Rocket Garden.
Those are descended from the weapons of war that German scientists
developed independent of Goddard’s experiments.
However, the ideas Goddard proposed and the successes he had
were certainly an inspiration.
In 1959, less than a year after NASA was officially up and running,
they named a whole center after the guy.
The rockets that humanity has used to explore space don’t look much like Nell.
They’re enormous, their parts are in different places.
And they can lift off with nearly a million times more thrust.
But Nell was the simplest possible version of what we use today,
and the first proof that something like them was possible.
That’s a pretty solid accolade…for the first liquid-fuel rocket.
Now, you can’t visit Nell in any museum.
Goddard cannibalized parts to use in his later models.
But this month, we’ve immortalized this historic rocket
in a pin that you can admire and take home.
Head over to DFTBA.com/SciShow to buy one.
And maybe check out some other cool SciShow merch while you’re there, too.
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