So I started this project about a month ago. I’ve been making icons of things for over 15 years now—it's a bit of an obsession. For 10 of those years, I’ve focused on space-themed designs, but somehow I only just got around to rockets.

If there’s one thing space geeks love, it’s rockets—the engines, the size, the roar, the raw power. They’re how we even get to look at a celestial body up close. A whole lot of power just to lift a spacecraft that’s barely bigger than a small bathroom.

But honestly, that’s all I really knew. Decades of seeing the Space Shuttle with its same tank and boosters had me thinking rockets were generally one thing until they made a newer, better version. Then I started this project.

I mean, just look at that ^. That’s the Atlas family of rockets. Originally developed as America’s first ICBM—probably what that tiny one is. The Atlas D launched the Mercury astronauts into space (the fifth one from the left). The one next to it lifted the first interplanetary missions with Mariner (#6). Then something called Atlas/Centaur put things like Pioneer into the outer solar system (I think that’s the 7th one).

And then there’s the Soviet/Russian program. They’ve essentially used three designs over 60+ years. The R7 rocket was in use from 1966 to 1994, which is around when the newer Soyuz rockets took over and have run their program up to today.

Anyway, all this to say that I thought I might have 60 rockets on this design, but it turned out to be way more complicated. I couldn’t have half of them being nearly identical repeats, so I tried to break it down to the most interesting and notable departures—or in some cases, just to include more recent international efforts beyond the US and Russia.

Here is what I included:

1. 0400 BC - Archyta’s Pigeon
2. 1926 - Goddard test
3. 1933 - Gird10-Russian
4. 1944 - German V2
5. 1947 - Bell X-1 (broke the sound barrier)
6. 1949 - Bumper Project
7. 1957 - R7 Sputnik
8. 1958 - Redstone Juno (w/explorer)
9. 1959 - R7 Luna
10. 1961 - R7 Vostok
11. 1961 - Mercury/Redstone (first chimp!)
12. 1962 - Atlas (w/Mercury Agena)
13. 1964 - Titan (Gemini)
14. 1966 - Soyuz
15. 1967 - Saturn V (Apollo/Skylab)
16. 1969 - N1 (Russian)
17. 1974 - Titan/Centaur (w/Voyager)
18. 1980 - The Space Shuttle System
19. 1990 - LongMarch (China)
20. 1996 - Ariane 5 (ESA)
21. 2002 - Delta (ULA)
22. 2013 - Antares
23. 2018 - Falcon Heavy
24. 2022 - SLS
25. 2023 - Starship

If anyone who knows their stuff reads this, let me know what I missed. I also made ones for Rocket Lab and Atlas with the Mariner Agena, but the tile alignment for the pattern left me no room for such frivolities.

Look for what this will become on Kickstarter in early September (‘24).