If you want to be unpopular in the technology community, there’s no better way to do it than to become a rocket designer. For centuries rocketeers have consistently ranked near the top of most people’s Least Favorite Inventors list, and with good reason.
The problems with rocketry started in the tenth century, when the Chinese first discovered that mixing charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate could lead to sudden explosions--as well as to late-night calls from Japan, Korea, and Mongolia wanting to know what the heck the racket was all about and if China had any idea what time it was. The Chinese soon learned how to use their explosive mixture to produce the world’s first gunpowder, bombs, and solid-fuel rockets, leading to more calls from Japan, Korea, and Mongolia saying that maybe they were a little too hasty in bothering China before and, honest, it was Thailand that made them call.
After the Chinese, rocket science plodded along slowly until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the liquid-fuel rocket was developed. Although a lot of people tinkered with them, liquid rockets were perfected principally by Robert Goddard, an American engineer, and Wernher Boom Boom von Braun, a German visionary who had always dreamed of traveling to the planets but whose rockets kept winding up at destinations just short of there--like Trafalgar Square.
Fueled mainly by hydrogen (H2), liquid oxygen (lox), and kerosene (cream cheese), liquid rockets flew farther and faster than any missiles ever had before, but their inventors did not always receive the appreciation they deserved. Von Braun, who had expected to be handsomely decorated after World War II, instead surrendered to the Allies and was invited to move to New Mexico to build rockets for the United States. Given the choice between the Land of Enchantment and Nuremberg, Von Braun packed his bags and headed west, mostly because the health benefits and vacation package were better. (Goddard’s fate has been even worse. Fully 72 percent of all college-age adults still appreciate him less for his ingenious multistage rockets than for his 1959 cinematic tour de force Breathless.)
