Robert Goddard (1882-1945) was a US rocket scientist. He launched the first successful liquid-fuel rocket in 1926, the core technology of the Space Age. Thanks to him we can now leave the world – and end it in a rain of nuclear missiles.
On October 19th 1899, at age 17, he was sitting in a cherry tree cutting off dead branches when:
“I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.”
He was a huge fan of H.G. Wells, especially “The War of the Worlds” (1898), which had just come out. He was also a fan of Jules Verne and Scientific American.
Unlike most fans, he set about to build a spaceship, at age 17, and spent his life doing it.
How to build a spaceship: He loved setting off rockets on the Fourth of July and had a thing for gyroscopes. Both would prove important for reaching Mars, but at first he was thinking of using a sort of perpetual motion machine:
“It seemed to me then that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by virtue of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path.”
He filled notebooks with ideas like that. And became a professor of physics.
In 1914 he had worked out how to reach Mars: it would take a multi-stage rocket using liquid oxygen. He filed his ideas with the US patent office, available to anyone for 10 cents.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, a fellow Jules Verne fan, had come up with pretty much the same ideas – in 1903! Unfortunately they appeared in The Scientific Review, little read outside Tsarist Russia. And he never tried to build such a device. Goddard did.
In 1920 the New York Times said:
“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
In 1926, at his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, Goddard launched the first successful liquid-fuel rocket (pictured above).
During the 1930s he tested his rockets near Roswell, New Mexico. Stuff that became familiar in the 1960s – rocket towers, countdowns, slow lift-offs, parachute landings, etc – were all there at Roswell (the scene of a UFO sighting two years after his death).
The first step: His rockets only got about 2.6 km up in the sky (space begins at 100 km), but they were the first step towards the stars.
In 1969, a day after Apollo 11 left for the Moon, the New York Times printed a “correction”:
“it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”
Apollo 11 leaves for the Moon, July 16th 1969.
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- Moon
- Mars:
- H.G. Wells
- 1898: The War of the Worlds
- 1901: The First Men in the Moon
- 1936: Things to Come – in which the first mission to the Moon, in 2036, leads to protests
- Fourth of July
- rocket
- Goddard most reminds me of:
- The New York Times
- US magazines in the 1970s – Scientific American among them
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Abagond 
Wow, took the New York Times 49 years to make the “correction”.
Anyhow, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (the country’s first ever space center) is located just outside Washington, DC in Prince George’s County, MD. I mentioned it here:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/prince-georges-county/
We took school field trips there when I was a student (including shortly after the Apollo moon landing), and later on, I had some friends who worked there. It is nice to learn a bit more about the man that the center was named after.
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Wow – Goddard started test launching in Roswell of all places.
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It took the New York Times 49 years to make the correction, but I like that they did it.
Most probably no one on the staff in the sixties remembered the dig at Goddard published way back in 1920. I spent a little time trying to find out, but the first few Google hits didn’t have any indication of how the old editorial came to the attention of the 1969 NYT staff.
I wonder if a reporter was going through the archives looking for information about Goddard because of the launch and just stumbled across it. Being in the pre-internet era, the reporter must have been working with paper files and indices, or maybe microfiche at best. It’s a wonder they even found it — and then decided to publicize their mistake from so long ago.
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Insightful post
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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The Father of modern rocketry
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Two comments.
First,
Ironic and interesting here is the fact that precisely the Newton’s law of action and reaction used here to rebuff Goddard’s pretension to put a rocket to fly in the vacuum, that ultimately explains why a rocket can, in fact, fly in vacuum!
The correct interpretation of certain natural laws sometimes requires looking into the details of the matter under analysis.
Autos move on the roads and ships on water applying a force in the opposite direction against the ground or water and being propelled by the reaction’s force of those media. This is a straightforward interpretation of Newton’s law.
In vacuum a rocket is able to fly exactly because it expels some material at a high velocity (momentum) and by the same Newton’s law this results in the rocket moving in the opposite direction of the expelled material.
Second,
I was surprised that you spoke at length about Goddard’s seminal work on rocket science and technology, but gave no word about the fact that in the same time other scientists made valuable contributions on the same subject, namely Herman Oberth in Germany and Konstantin Tsiokovsky in Russia (Soviet Union).
My surprise is even higher because of the fact that many people even believe that the Germans were more advanced than anybody else in rocket technology during World War II – remember the attacks against Great Britain using V-2 devices – and after that some of their scientists went to America and helped the USA to develop its own rocket technology.
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My apologies. You cited the work of Konstantin Tsiokovsky in your piece.
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@ Munubantu
As I’ve been reading up on this topic today, I’ve also seen Robert Esnault-Pelterie of France repeatedly mentioned as one of the pioneers of rocket science along with Goddard, Oberth, and Tsiolkovsky.
All four appear to have been inspired in part by the science fiction writers of the day, most notably Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
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I always thought it was Wernher Von Braun who was responsible for getting America into space.
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According to no less a personage then Werner Von Braun, Pedro Paulet Mostajo may have beat Godard to the title of father of liquid-propellant rocketry. “Had Paulet’s claim been authenticated, he might today be considered the father of liquid-propellant rocketry, rather than Robert H. Goddard, who in 1926, flew a liquid-fueled rocket engine in a test vehicle.”
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Paulet was Peruvian.
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