🧵 Why did rocketry development take so long?

Anonymous at Fri, 22 Nov 2024 19:06:22 UTC No. 16489464

When I look at rocketry and space milestones, I don't think I understand why there are such large gaps between things that at least appear to be not that dissimilar.
Like the first space-going rocket got real high up in 1941, and then it wasn't until after WWII that we actually bothered collecting cool data from earth's upper atmosphere and near-earth space. At least in this case it was a massive war that kept scientific milestones in rocketry, in favor of putting big bomb on a rocket.
Then it wasn't until 1957, 10 years later, that we actually got a probe to orbit the Earth. Isn't it just a matter of making the rocket bigger to give it the delta-v to get into orbit? Were radios not advanced enough to beam controls from the ground up 700km? Was it just a matter of a lack of funding needed to finance a big rocket?
And it was years after 1957 that we sent a man into space. Wouldn't we have had reliable enough reentry procedures from previous tests? If it was a lack of funding, how soon could have we actually done these things if funding wasn't a bottleneck?