A liquid rocket engine has fuel and oxidizer in liquid form, as opposed to a solid rocket or hybrid rocket or gaseous propellant. A Redstone rocket, part of the Mercury program The traditional definition of a rocket is a vehicle, missile or aircraft which obtains thrust by the reaction to the ejection of fast moving fluid from within a rocket engine. ... Fuel is any material that is capable of releasing energy when its chemical or physical structure is changed or converted. ... An oxidizing agent is a substance that oxidizes another substance in electrochemistry or redox chemical reactions in general. ... A liquid will usually assume the shape of its container. ... The Space Shuttle is initially launched with the help of solid-fuel boosters A Solid rocket or a solid fuel rocket is a rocket with a motor that uses solid propellants (fuel/oxidizer). ... A hybrid rocket propulsion system is a rocket engine composed of a solid propellant lining a combustion chamber into which a liquid or gaseous propellant is injected so as to undergo a strong exothermic reaction to produce hot gas that is emitted through a De Laval nozzle for propulsive purposes. ...

Rockets are classified by the propellant used in their engines. The two main types of engines are solid fuel and liquid fuel. Liquid rockets are one of the major types of rocket. Liquids are mainly used rather than gases because of their high density, which permits high mass fractions, since the tankage is relatively light; tankage fractions of 100 can be achieved. In aerospace engineering, the mass fraction is an important measure of a rockets efficiency. ...

A liquid rocket could be monopropellant (using a single type of propellant), bipropellant (combining two types of propellants, such as hydrogen and oxygen) or tripropellant (using three types of propellant). A monopropellant rocket (or monoprop rocket) is a rocket that uses a single chemical as its power source and propellant. ... F-1 rocket engine (The kind used by the Saturn V.) A bipropellant rocket engine is a rocket engine that uses two fluid propellants stored in separate tanks that are injected into, and undergo a strong exothermic reaction, in a rockets combustion chamber. ... General Name, Symbol, Number hydrogen, H, 1 Chemical series nonmetals Group, Period, Block 1, 1, s Appearance colorless Atomic mass 1. ... General Name, Symbol, Number oxygen, O, 8 Chemical series Nonmetals, chalcogens Group, Period, Block 16, 2, p Appearance colorless (gas) very pale blue (liquid) Atomic mass 15. ... A Tripropellant rocket is a form of spacecraft propulsion that uses two fuels and one oxidizer. ...

History

The idea of liquid fuel rocket as understood in the modern context first appears in the book Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами (The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices), by Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky. This seminal treatise on astronautics was published in 1903. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Konstanty Ciołkowski), (Константин Эдуардович Циолковский; September 5, 1857 new style – September 19, 1935...

The first flight of a liquid-rocket powered vehicle occurred March 16, 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts USA by American professor Robert Goddard and his rocket, which used oxygen and gasoline as propellants. The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid-fueled rockets were possible. Robert Goddard Robert Hutchings Goddard (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945) was one of the pioneers of modern rocketry. ...

Liquid-fueled rockets powered the first generation of modern ballistic missile weapons beginning with the German A4 SRBM in 1942, principally due to the higher energy-content of liquid fuels compared to their solid fueled cousins at the time. Look up A4 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... SRBM is a millitary acronym for Short Range Ballistic Missile. ...

External links

• An online book entitled ”How to Design, Build, and Test Small Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engines”

See also

• Solid rocket

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