Spacecraft engines

Usage examples of rockets.

It resembled a fetus, a monstrous thing brought to birth by mad scientists, and at the far northern end stood the launching sites for the great rockets that had alarmed the world.

The bomb that these men scoffed at was a reality, or almost so, and the likelihood that Germany might be first to launch it, and with rockets that could not be intercepted, was so awful to contemplate that everything possible must be done to interdict it.

German A-4 rockets and the monstrous American bombers, Mott wondered at the curious and self-defeating decision made by Adolf Hitler.

One of his famed rockets could deliver about a ton of explosive, and never on a precisely determined target, while an American bomber, which cost about the same as a rocket, could drop six tons within a closely defined area.

Hitler had made a hideously wrong choice, but Mott also knew that before long the Germans would have stouter rockets capable of delivering eight and ten tons of explosives, and his secret briefings had caused him to fear that within the year someone would have anew kind of bomb which would be calculated in the million-ton range, and someone else would have rockets which could deliver such a bomb across the Atlantic.

The general, an engineer and not a scientist, was in charge of building the great A-4 rockets which the scientific genius, young Wernher von Braun, had devised, and the job was not an easy one, for whenever General Breutzl had a production line nicely started, Von Braun altered the specifications, requiring a complete reorientation of machines and men.

A-4s could be launched against London, and repeatedly there had been debacles, with rockets disintegrating in midair, but the three men had plodded on, convinced that what they had envisaged could fly, could carry a massive load of explosive to London and deliver it on target.

You, Kolff, have been heard predicting that the monthly quota of nine hundred rockets cannot be met.

And all three of you are known to be planning for the years after the war, when your rockets can be used for travel to the Moon, or the planets.

Nazi war effort, for when the precious A-4s continued to blow up while aloft, he went almost directly from the prison cell in Stettin to a watch point on the Baltic coast northeast of that city, and there, in the heart of the area on which the defective rockets fell, he stationed himself with binoculars and camera, awaiting the next test shots.

First London, and when the English were battered to their knees, fifty even more powerful rockets every day into the heart of Moscow, or whatever other city the Russians held.

And still Kolff kept silent, for he was thinking that any sensible observer of this war must know that throwing casual and almost accidental single rockets at London was never going to subdue that city or its allies.

Good God, he thought, this is almost November, and only seventy-three rockets have hit London, with twenty-six of them landing in remote suburbs.

West German towns, so highly did the Russians value their knowledge, and for some months Liesl trembled with fear, convinced that she was about to be snatched because she knew that secret papers regarding future rockets existed.

Fort Bliss and completely acclimatized to life in the Texas-Mexican Southwest, when news came that the Army had decided to experiment with rockets in a massive way.