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Rocket Mail of the WorldA Brief History of Rocketry and Rocket MailWhen the Chinese mixed potassium nitrate (saltpeter), sulfur, and charcoal together in the 9th century they were looking for an elixir to extend life. Instead, they invented gunpowder. While it didn%u2019t seem to have much medicinal value, it was soon used to produce fireworks. And for propelling small rockets to shoot fireworks high into the air.It didn%u2019t take long before rockets were used in warfare, first by attaching small gunpowder-filled tubes to arrows. These fire-arrows could ignite wooden structures from a distance, a useful military technology that was expanded upon and spread to other countries. Similar devices were used in battles in the Middle East in the late 1200s, in India as early as 1300, in Korea in the later 1300s, and in 1380 in a naval battle between Venice and Genoa.In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton%u2019s three laws of motion nudged rocketry into the scientific age, and rocket experiments soon followed in the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia. British ships fired them at Fort McHenry in the War of 1812%u2014inspiring Francis Scott Key to write %u201cthe rockets%u2019 red glare,%u201d in a poem that later became the Star-Spangled Banner.Modern RocketryWhile many individuals helped bring the science of rocketry into the modern era, three individual scientists stand out, a Russian, an American, and a German: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert H. Goddard, and Hermann Oberth. Although the three performed similar research and arrived at comparable conclusions, there is no evidence they knew details of each other%u2019s work, so all three share the title of Father of Rocketry. Each has a crater named in their honor on the Moon.Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky was born in Russia in 1857. Accomplished in both science and mathematics, he became a schoolteacher. After reading Jules Verne%u2019s novels about space travel, he began to write his own science fiction stories, tales that included elements of science and technology, such as the problem of controlling a rocket as it moved between different gravitational fields. Over time, Tsiolkovsky progressed from science fiction to writing technical and theoretical papers on topics such as gyroscopes, escape velocities, the principle of action and reaction, and the use of liquid propellant in rockets.In 1897, Tsiolkovsky built Russia%u2019s first wind tunnel. As an insightful visionary, he pondered the use of rockets to explore space, and in 1903 published a rocket equation now called the Tsiolkovsky formula, which established the relationship between a rocket%u2019s speed, the speed of its gas at exit, the mass of the rocket, and the mass of its propellant. In 1911, he authored Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices, and in 1914, Aims of Astronauts. By using mathematics and physics to study how rockets operated, he established a subject now known as rocket dynamics. In 1989%u2014long after his 1935 death%u2014he was inducted into the International Aerospace Hall of Chinese soldier with a fire-arrow.1957 USSR postage stamp honoring the 100thanniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.