what was the rockets opinion about itself? how does it describe it's ancestry
Answers
Answer:
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Explanation:
All Americans know these words: “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” The line has a special meaning to me, as the former curator of rocketry at the National Air and Space Museum, because the rockets that inspired Francis Scott Key to write what would become the national anthem represent one of the foundations of modern rocketry. Two hundred years ago this month, Key witnessed the British fleet launching the rockets over Baltimore Harbor during the battle for Fort McHenry, an historic victory that interrupted a string of U.S. defeats during the War of 1812. Today, on the National Air and Space Museum website, you can see a replica of the type of rocket the British used in the battle for Baltimore and throughout the war. The model was given to the Museum in 1976, a birthday present from the Science Museum of London.
The rockets were the brainchild of the highly inventive William Congreve, who happened to be the son of a British lieutenant general of the Royal Artillery. The younger Congreve devised them, beginning in 1804, as a means of destroying Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet, then threatening to invade England. Before Congreve began his experiments, the basic rocket was no more than a conveyance for fireworks. A rocket was sometimes used to send signals. Even though the technology was a thousand years old—it had probably originated in China—it had hardly changed from its beginnings. Propelled by gunpowder, rockets had a range of barely a few hundred feet and were wildly unpredictable in flight. Congreve improved their effectiveness by increasing their size, compacting the gunpowder more tightly in brazed-iron cylinders, and devising a variety of warheads. He also calculated the most effective angle of launch. He increased the ranges up to 3,000 yards (more than 1.7 miles), though flight paths were still unpredictable and the weapons were far from accurate.
Congreve first experimented with cardboard-cased fireworks types known as “skyrockets.” He then created a series of larger models with iron bodies, from the smallest six-pounder shell in a spherical explosive warhead to a monster with a diameter of 18 inches. The 18-inch-caliber rocket, weighing nearly 300 pounds, was incendiary, intended to burn the wooden ships of the day or to set fires inside forts. It was expensive to make and cumbersome to carry into battle, so it remained experimental. A 3.5-inch-diameter 32-pounder was the most favored size—and the kind fired against Fort McHenry on September 13 and 14, 1814. It carried seven pounds of incendiary mixture.