All Early Rocket Experimenters

People who tried out rockets as a means of flight or research before rocketry became an engineering profession, whether in legend or in the laboratory. Wan Hu, the Chinese official of the early Ming dynasty said to have tried to rise on a chair driven by rockets, and Clarence N. Hickman, the American physicist who worked on rockets with Robert Goddard and later developed the bazooka, both belong here. A person belongs here when the cited article presents them as testing rockets themselves or as an early assistant of such a test program, rather than as the designer of an operational spacecraft or launch vehicle. The engineers of the American, Chinese, German, Soviet and other national space programs have groups of their own.