FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Watch this Delightfully Profane Short History of Rockets

“Space is taunting us and Mars looks pretty dope.”
Screenshot from “A Song About Rockets.” Image: exurb1a/YouTube

"A Song About Rockets." Video: exurb1a/YouTube

Humans have invented a lot of cool technologies over the millennia, but rocketry just might take the cake. With their raw power, sleek frames, and Earth-transcending abilities, rockets are not only captivating marvels of engineering, they are our tickets to the wider universe.

That's why YouTube personality and general creator of stuff exurb1a penned "A Song About Rockets," an animated ode to this most pyrotechnic of human vehicles. Exurb1a's channel is known for producing "spacey stuff and existential angst," and the newest release (it was posted on Sunday) has plenty of both.

The short musical history charts out the development of rocketry, from early gunpowder-based weapons to the spectacular diversity of rocket families that has evolved since—for instance, SpaceX's futuristic Falcon family, or NASA's historic Saturn family.

Along the way, exurb1a hits on major turning points in the evolution of rocketry, including Isaac Newton's astrodynamic theories, Robert Goddard's revolutionary model featuring multiple stacked stages, the US-Russian Space Race, and our ongoing exploration of the solar system with robotic probes like NASA's Juno orbiter, which recently arrived at Jupiter. Laika, everyone's favorite cosmonaut dog, is given an especially touching shoutout.

At a lean four minutes, the video is a brief but entertaining primer on the self-evident awesomeness of rockets, laced with just the right amount of bleakness and profanity. Enjoy.