This guide provides teachers and students many opportunities. Chapters within the guide present the history of rocketry, National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) 21st Century Space Exploration Policy, rocketry principles, and practical rocketry. These topics lay the foundation for what follows--a wealth of dynamic rocket science classroom activities that work. The activities focus on Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion and how they apply to rockets. They incorporate cooperative learning, problem solving, critical thinking, and hands-on involvement. They support national and state standards for science, mathematics, and technology across many grade levels. All of the activities are designed with the classroom in mind. They include clear descriptions, background information for the teacher and student, detailed procedures and tips, lists of readily available materials, assessments, questions for discussion, and extensions. The activities are designed to foster excitement and a passion for learning. It has been created as a two to six week classroom unit depending upon the grade level of the students but individual activities can be extracted and used as stand-alone classroom experiences. Teachers will find activity objectives and principles clearly stated along with the vocabulary terms necessary for understanding the principles involved. [The original "Rockets Teacher Guide" was published by NASA's Education Division in the mid-1990s.].

Students examine early rockets and learn about their development. They learn about rocket science and mathematics and what rocket scientists do. Chapters present the history of rocketry, NASA's 21st Century Space Exploration Policy, rocketry principles and practical rocketry and include dynamic rocket science classroom activities that work.

Militarily, use of spacebased assets, when integrated with operations, assumes importance as one of the many force multipliers. As on date, outer space is being extensively used by the armed forces for varied services which include navigation, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, environmental monitoring and advance warning. The command and control in today’s netcentric environment also depends on space resources. Thus, the use of outer space with spacebased assets in support of military operations leads to the deduction that space as a medium stands militarised. Of late, many of the dominant nations have developed, or are expanding, capabilities to attack the spacebased assets of potential adversaries to disrupt command and control structures. Countries like the US and China are contesting for space supremacy and working towards developing spacebased weapons capable of being delivered from spacebased platforms. These developments, in turn, are infusing a sense of insecurity amongst other international players, including India, and have raised concerns worldwide. Development of spacebased weapons by any state has the potential to ignite a new arms race in space as many countries now possess the wherewithal for launching spacebased assets capable of carrying the required payloads. Thus, from the present capability of ‘militarisation of space’, we seem to be graduating towards ‘weaponisation of space’. As outer space has been designated as one of the ‘global’ commons, any sort of deployment or employment of space weapons raises concerns and any use of spacebased weapons will have unpleasant cascading effects. In the absence of any international curb or law on space weaponisation, it continues to be a conceptual possibility as well as an empirical reality.