Medieval rockets to first satellites

China has a long history in astronomy, astronautics, and rocketry. Although ancient astronomy began in Babylon, China was not far behind and has the longest history of continuous observing of any civilization. Eclipses were observed as far back as 2165 вс and records of stars can be found carved into bones dating to 1400 вс. A supernova was observed in Antares in 1300 вс and the first star catalogs were found in 350 BC, outlining the “mansions” of the sky, Uke western constellations. The first meteor showers were recorded in 687 BC. Comet Halley was observed in 467 BC and sunspots in 28 BC. The first sundials were made in 104 BC, the same year as the building of the first observatory, Zijin Shan (Purple Mountain) near Nanjing. A golden age of Chinese astronomy opened from the seventh century, when the emperor Yao commissioned the first star maps and calendar (AD 650). These star charts had 1,340 stars, 12 constellations, over-the-pole views, and used the Mercator system of projection [1]. China has a continuous history of weather records dating 3,000 years.

Chinese astronomy expanded rapidly in the second millennium, with instruments of great complexity such as clock drives, celestial globes, and equatorial spheres (1090-92). Song dynasty astronomers observed a pulsar, 0 Tauri, for 23 days from 4th July 1056. By 1150, the imperial library had 369 books on astronomy and a map of the Milky Way was made in 1193. In 1276, the Dong Feng observatory used a low wall to measure the precise distance to the Sun while Nankin observatory built the first telescope with an equatorial mounting. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of ancient Chinese astronomy was that, instead of Europe, where the sky was seen as a Umited, hemispherical orb, ancient Chinese cosmology (AD 336) conceived the universe as “infinite empty space” through which stars moved at speed. Both theoretically and practically, the Chinese were almost 1,000 years ahead of Europe.

The rocket – the word means “firing arrow” in Chinese – was invented in China. The ancient Chinese discovered the secret of gunpowder in the third century – some time between AD 220 and 265. The formula took 1,000 years to work its way westward, to reach England by 1248, where it was known to Roger Bacon (for the record, the formula is 50% niter KN03, 25% sulfur, 25% carbon). Gunpowder was fitted to the heads of arrows to explode on hitting their target and firecrackers were introduced for festivals at around this time. The use of gunpowder rather than the

B. Harvey, China in Space: The Great Leap Forward, Springer Praxis Books,

DOI 10.1007/978-l-4614-5043-6_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

bow to propel the arrow was invented by Feng Jishen in 970, making it the first rocket. Primitive rockets were used by the Song dynasty in 1083. Later, the Mongols learned to use these rockets and made them the basis of the expansion of their empire. When the Japanese invaded China in 1275, Kublai Khan fired rockets to drive them away.

The Chinese then began to put their rockets into launching tubes. The first of these, Flying fire spear, used a paper container and was introduced in 1119. During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), these early Chinese rockets came into their own. They possessed the fundamental elements of modern rockets: a combustion chamber, firing system, explosive fuels, and fin guidance systems (feathers). The Ming histories reported that over 39 types of rocket weapons were in use and a group of rocket troops was formed. They had names to match their fearfulness, like Soaring flame bird, Burning crow, and Poison sand barrel, large bird-shaped missiles that exploded on impact, scattering fire and poison. Fire dragon over water was a 150-cm multi-stage anti-ship rocket with a range of 1 km. In the twenty-first century, engineers re-examined these missiles and confirmed just how aerodynamically stable they were [2].

Some of these rockets eventually found their way to India, where they were retrieved by British soldiers in the late eighteenth century and became the basis for

their rocket troops that fired on Napoleon’s armies. More peacefully, a sixteenth – century inventor called Wan Hu designed a wickerwork chair with two kites above and 47 rockets underneath. Wan Hu disappeared in flame and smoke and was never seen again, but a crater on the Moon is now named after him, so in one sense he made it after all.