Rocket Tattoo Meaning

Ambition, ascent, exploration, and the trajectory beyond the known.

Wan Hu was a Chinese official of the Ming dynasty who allegedly strapped forty-seven rockets to a chair and lit them simultaneously.

The story is almost certainly apocryphal — it appears in no contemporaneous Chinese sources and is first documented in Western accounts from the early 20th century. But it has persisted because it captures something true about the human relationship to rocket flight: the desire to go up, the willingness to strap yourself to the thing that burns, the gamble on whether the fire will carry you or consume you.

Wan Hu is said to have vanished in the explosion. A crater on the Moon is named for him.

The Chinese invented gunpowder in the 9th century and fire arrows — rockets — by the 10th. The Mongol invasions spread the technology across Asia and into the Islamic world and Europe. By the 13th century, rockets were military weapons on multiple continents. By the 20th century, they were the only technology capable of leaving the planet.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian schoolteacher who was almost entirely deaf, worked out the mathematics of spaceflight in 1903 — the rocket equation that governs every spacecraft ever launched. He never built a rocket. He sat in his small house in Kaluga, Russia, and calculated the requirements for leaving Earth and concluded it was possible.

He wrote: Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.

The rocket is the instrument of the oldest human ambition — the one that looked up and wanted to go there — made finally possible by the mathematics of a deaf schoolteacher and the fire that the Chinese discovered in a laboratory accident a thousand years before.

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