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The Energia (or Energiya, Энергия in Russian, meaning Energy) rocket was a Soviet rocket that was designed by NPO Energia to serve as a heavy-lift expendable launch system as well as a booster for the Buran Space Shuttle. It had the capacity to place around 100 metric tons in Low Earth orbit.
Work on the Energia/Buran system began in 1976 after the decision was made to cancel the unsuccessful N1 rocket. The cancelled N1 rocket-based Manned Lunar Launch Facilities and Infrastructure were used for Energia (notably the huge horizontal assembly building) - just as NASA reused infrastructure designed for the Saturn V in the Space Shuttle program. Energia also replaced the "Vulkan" concept, which was a design based on the Proton rocket and using the same toxic hypergolic fuels, but much larger and more powerful. The "Vulkan" designation was later on given to a variation of the Energia which has eight boosters and multiple stages.
The Energia was first test-launched 15 May 1987 21:30 with Polyus (UKSS military payload), where the Energia itself functioned well, but the Polyus did not reach orbit due to a mishap of its own attitude control system after separation from Energia.
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The photo shows the "energy flash" when a projectile launched at speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour impacts a solid surface at the Hypervelocity Ballistic Range at NASA's Ames Research Center.
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Hermann Julius Oberth (June 25, 1894—December 28, 1989) was a German physicist, and one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics.
In 1922, his doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". He had the 92-page work privately published as the controversial Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (By Rocket into Planetary Space). (In 1929, Oberth would expand this to a 429-page work entitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt or Ways to Spaceflight.)
In autumn 1929, Oberth launched his first liquid fuel rocket, named Kegeldüse. He was helped in this experiment by his students at the Technical University of Berlin, one of whom was Wernher von Braun, who would later head the wartime project to develop the rocket officially called the A4, but far better known today as the V-2.