Anyone who is old enough to remember the Apollo space missions and in particular, the Apollo 11 moonshot of 1969, will probably carry a fascination for rockets with them for the rest of their days. I well remember sitting in front of the television, watching the Apollo 11 rocket on the gantry with the countdown timer gradually getting closer to that unforgettable, historic takeoff...in fact, I watched about three hours worth of countdown!

Ever since that day I had been fascinated by how rockets work, though I could never work out how, having reached a certain altitude, they managed to keep rising. After all, when they took off, I could see that the rocket was thrusting against the ground, but when it got higher, there was nothing to thrust against, so how could it keep going?

I discovered the answer many years later and this is the explanation to my old quandary - the solution lies in Newton's third law of motion: "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction".

Imagine being on an ice rink, holding a football. If you were to throw the football to your front, the ball would be thrown forward, but equally you would be displaced backwards. The two factors that would determine how far you would be displaced are; how heavy the football was (its mass) and how hard you threw it (the amount of acceleration that you apply).

From this observation we can derive a simple formula; the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration will give you the force (F = M x A). Whatever force is used against the football, will produce an equal and opposite force against your body.

This give us the basis to do some predictive calculations; If we assume that the football weighs one pound and we throw it away at 20mph, we already know that your body will be displaced. Let us assume that your body weighs 100 pounds (100 times more than the ball), you will be pushed back at 1/100th the velocity of the ball - 0.20 mph. If you want to accelerate away a bit faster than this, you will need to increase the force acting on you and the ball, by either increasing the mass of the ball or by throwing it faster (increasing its acceleration).

This principle explains exactly how a rocket works; the rocket's engine is ‘throwing out' mass in the form of high pressure gas and the resultant action produces an equal opposite reaction. The detail of the ‘mass', is that it starts out as say 1,000 kg of fuel and through the combustion process, the fuel is transformed into 1,000 kg of expelled gas. The acceleration equates to the high pressure that the gas is expelled at. Having understood this, it is somewhat easier to see the solution to my boyhood conundrum, the rocket is not thrusting against the ground to maintain its ascent. The combustion process was thrusting against itself.

Looking back to the dawn of modern day rocket technology, we find that the most important research in this field evolved in Germany during the 1930's and 1940's. At the end of the Second World War, most of this research was sent back to America and utilised to form the basis of American military and civilian rocket development.

The German research was translated by military translators, as it had been gained as part of the spoils of war...these days; even more advanced research is freely shared and distributed amongst the academic and business community for the benefit and advancement of all.

Unlike the 1940's though, technical translations can easily be commissioned through one of the many worldwide technical translations agencies Technical translators nowadays, however, are also likely to be qualified in engineering as well as languages, ensuring an even better standard of translation than that which was available in the 1940's and that's saying something. After all, those 40's translators helped put a man on the moon!

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