In the early-thirteenth century, the Chinese invented the rocket by packing gunpowder into a tube and setting fire to the powder. Half a millenium later, the British Army colonel, William Congreve, developed a rocket that could carry a 20-pound warhead nearly three miles. In 1926, the American physicist Robert Goddard built and flew the first liquid-fueled rocket, becoming the father of rocket science in the United States. In Russia, a mathematics teacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky derived and published the mathematical theory and equations governing rocket propulsion.

Tsiolkovsky's work was largely ignored until the Germans began to employ it to build rocket-based weapons in the 1920s under the leadership of mathematician and physicist Hermann Oberth. In October of 1942, the Germans launched the first rocket to penetrate the lower reaches of space. It reached a speed of 3,500 miles per hour, giving it a range of about 190 miles...