"Modern rockets originated in 1926 when Goddard attached a supersonic (de Laval) nozzle to a high pressure combustion chamber"

So, rockets have had almost a century of development too. You could even stretch that and claim more like 6-700 years, as the Chinese had "one of the world's earliest multistage rockets and ballistic cruise missiles" around the 14th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongchushui