Unsung

The history of rocketry is yet to be written. To this day, rocket science is a joke
which arises in the context of ' dumb and dumber'  jokes. Indeed, there are
difficulties.

Robert Goddard(1882-1945), the first to build a liquid-fuel rocket, considered his work
in the following terms: "...the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of
tomorrow."  A German pioneer, Herman Oberth(1894-1989) was an avid reader of Jules
Verne, and came to the idea of a multi-stage rocket at 14. His phd thesis was later refused
as being too 'utopian'. This is what he had to say about the educational system:  "Our
educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating
the past. But looking forward, things are barely discernible."

The first true rocket, built during World War II, was a ballistic missile the - V2 - an engine of
destruction used against Allied forces. It was built thanks to Wernher von Braun(1912-1977),
a team of scientists from many countries, and the assembly-line skills of the workers of a
concentration camp, Dora-Mittelbau. The prototype picured below was painted with checker-
board squares so that the team could eye-ball it during flight to monitor if it rolled. It was
launched in 1943.

There are surely lessons to be learnt from this complex history as, today, some of the
least reasonable among us are packing their bags for Mars. It beats being stuck in traffic.

source: Wikipedia