Who invented rockets?

The earliest reliable references to rockets come from China's Song dynasty, in the 13th century: bamboo or paper tubes filled with gunpowder and tied to arrows, used in battle. The technique traveled across Asia and the Middle East and reached Europe in the 14th century. In the late 18th century the Kingdom of Mysore, in India, used iron-cased rockets against British troops, and engineer William Congreve copied and improved them for the Royal Navy; the "Congreve rockets" bombarded Copenhagen in 1807 and Fort McHenry in 1814.

The rocket as a means of leaving Earth was formulated, each independently, by three pioneers. The Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published in 1903 the equation relating attainable velocity to propellant mass, and already proposed liquid fuel and multiple stages. American Robert Goddard turned theory into hardware: on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts, he flew the first liquid-fueled rocket, using gasoline and liquid oxygen, which rose 12.5 m in 2.5 seconds. German Hermann Oberth published in 1923 the treatise that inspired the next generation of engineers in his country.

That generation, led by Wernher von Braun, developed the A-4 for the German army, known as the V-2, the first large ballistic missile. A test V-2 exceeded 100 km in altitude in June 1944, becoming the first human-made object to reach space. After the war, its engineers and captured rockets became the foundation of the US and Soviet space programs.