Debbie Miller, age 7, of Huntsville, Alabama, for her question:

Who invented the rocket?

The history books say that the rocket was invented by the Chinese. But a college educated squid might deny this claim to fame. He squirts out jets of water to rocket himself through the water. His ancestors had built in water rockets of this sort hundreds of millions of years ago. The Chinese, however, did invent the first rocket that shoots aloft on a pushing puff of air. Their first rockets were fired at their enemies in 1232 A.D., 700 years before our Space Age began.

Rockets based on gunpowder charges were used by the British and other nations up through the 1800s, but they were not much better than guns and bullets in their travel power. Russian and Polish inventors worked on some more advanced rockets, but so far as we know they never got off the ground. The first successful modern rocket was designed by an American named Robert Goddard in 1914. It was launched in 1926 and traveled 184 feet before it plonked to the ground. Many inventors have made plans to use the squid's rocket idea. When at last Goddard succeeded, other inventors added improvements for building the bigger and better rockets of the Space Age.