A launch pad is an above-ground facility from which a rocket-powered missile or space vehicle is vertically launched. The term launch pad can be used to describe just the central launch platform, or the entire complex. The entire complex will include a launch mount or launch platform to physically support the vehicle, a service structure with umbilicals, and the infrastructure required to provide propellants, cryogenic fluids, electrical power, communications, telemetry, rocket assembly, payload processing, storage facilities for propellants and gases, equipment, access roads, and drainage.
Launch pad at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B on Merritt Island, Florida
Transport of Soyuz rocket to pad by train
Transport of Space Shuttle and MLP to pad on Crawler-transporter
SLC-40 with SpaceX Falcon 9 launch infrastructure. The four towers surrounding the rocket are lightning arresters, and acts like a giant Faraday cage
A rocket is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using the surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely from propellant carried within the vehicle; therefore a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space. Rockets work more efficiently in a vacuum and incur a loss of thrust due to the opposing pressure of the atmosphere.
A Soyuz-FG rocket launches from "Gagarin's Start" (Site 1/5), Baikonur Cosmodrome
Rocket arrows depicted in the Huolongjing: "fire arrow", "dragon-shaped arrow frame", and a "complete fire arrow"
Mysorean rockets and rocket artillery used to defeat an East India Company battalion during the Battle of Guntur
William Congreve at the bombardment of Copenhagen (1807) during the Napoleonic Wars