Rockets existed thousands of years ago but never worked well. The first solid rocket fuel was in the form of gunpowder, and the first documented mention of gunpowder comes from China in the late third century BC. The Chinese placed gunpowder in bamboo tubes and threw them into fire in hopes of producing sounds loud enough to scare evil spirits away from them. Some of the bamboo tubes were not sealed properly and instead of making loud sounds they shot fire that flew into the air. An intelligent observer noticed this and started testing rockets and that was the first discovery of rockets. It was later used in China's war tactics. In 1232 AD they built the first rocket and it flew around the room. After seeing Chinese rockets, other civilizations began using rockets in their warfare tactics. They used “fire arrows” for wars. It was difficult to control and they didn't know if it would harm them or the enemy. The first rocket to reach space first was the Russian one, but America arrived on the Moon on July 20, 1969. That was one of the most historic moments in American history. Rockets use Newton's laws of motion. The First Law states that objects at rest remain at rest and objects in motion remain in motion in a straight line unless an unbalanced force intervenes. The second law states that force equals mass times acceleration. The third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Rockets exploit the first law of motion by using the enormous force of rocket power to lift the object from its stationary position. The second law is how much force is needed to lift the object off the ground. It uses the Third Law that the force of the rocket going downward has an equal and opposite...... center of the card...... a few decades or so. It took a long time for the concept to turn into reality. The first successful demonstration of the solar sail came only in 2010. The Japanese Ikaros probe deployed a 46-foot-wide sail and became the first spacecraft to travel through space on the backs of photons. NASA followed the Japanese five months later, launching the tiny NanoSail-D demonstrator into Earth orbit in November 2010. The NanoSail-D unfurled its sail in January 2011, then circled the planet for eight months before burn in the atmosphere. More projects from NASA and other companies loom on the horizon, giving momentum to the technology. A major milestone is expected to come in early 2016, when NASA plans to launch the largest solar sail ever made into space. One day NASA will get there and then space flight will be easier and cheaper.