I thought this was great for a scrwewy reason. When I was about 11 or 12, the possibility of even "low earth orbit" space travel seemed only a dream and a techological impossibility; only rockets and people who rode in them to outer space existed in the comic strips of Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers.
Somewhere back then one of my school Weekly Readers had an article about going into space by rockets. The article said to do that, a rocket would have to reach the speed of 25,000 miles an hour (called "escape velocity" now). At that time, only captured German V-1 rockets had enough thrust to barely make it out of te earth's atmosphere and could not carry even one human aloft.
Being an in-class drawing "doodler" who was all time getting rapped on te head by the teacher's ruler for not paying attention, I nonetheless solved that "escape velocity" problem years before NASA did--by drawing a rocket made up of three rockets. As each rocket ("stage")fired then burnt out and broke free ("ejected")the rocket went faster and faster until it reached 25,000 miles and hour ("escape velocity") and got into outer space--to do what when it did, I didn't go as far as to figure that out--go to the moon, maybe...
Only thing wrong was, I drew long, sleek fins on each stage rocket--without realizing fins on a rocket are useless in the airlessness of outer space. Also, I didn't think about how to keep the returning rocket and its crew from burning up when it rentered the friction of the earth's atmosphere--but a popular, scientific state of the art- movie of that time about a rocket to the moon ("Destination Moon", available on DVD) didn't think about those two things, either.
