GODDARD ROCKET
AS A BOY IN
MASSACHUSETTS, ROBERT GODDARD
LOVED TO BE OUTDOORS AND TO LOOK
AT THE STARS.
He developed a fascination for flight, first for kites and then for balloons. He once tried to create a balloon out of aluminum and fill it with hydrogen, but it was too heavy to float. After reading H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the seventeen-year-old Goddard had a vivid daydream. He was in a cherry tree in his parents' backyard, and he pictured himself ascending to Mars in a spinning spacecraft. He later identified this as the start of his lifelong obsession with finding a way to make space travel feasible.
In 1909, after years of investigation, Goddard realized that a rocket was a workable propulsion system for spaceflight. A talented physics student, he quickly worked out the equations. Little did he know that at the same time several men in Europe were also puzzling through equations and discovering the rocket as the key to spaceflight. Goddard was one of three men (along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth) who accomplished this. He published his research in early 1920 in a technical article in which he very briefly broached the idea that a rocket could escape gravity and reach the Moon.
Goddard's bold vision for spaceflight garnered much public attention. After his 1920 paper, newspapers around the nation were talking about Goddard: "New Rocket Devised by Prof. Goddard May Hit Face of the Moon" blared the Boston Herald. At first some scoffed at his ideas. A New York Times editorial titled "A Severe Strain on Credulity" wrongly accused Goddard of misunderstanding basic scientific principles. However, only a few years later the Times took him more seriously, with a detailed article under the headline "Hopes to Reach Moon with a Giant Rocket." And the newspaper retracted its editorial with a correction … in 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission.
In March 1926, Goddard conducted his first launch with liquid-propellant rockets. The test, done on a relative's farm near Auburn, Massachusetts, reached a height of 41 feet and traveled 184 feet across the ground. For modern rocketry this launch is comparable to the Wright brothers' first flight.
Before Goddard invented his rocket, only gunpowder-based rockets like fireworks existed. Goddard was convinced that he could build a new type of rocket capable of escaping Earth's gravity and going into space. It would require a fuel that could give a rocket greater speed than gunpowder-based fuel.
Goddard gained worldwide attention again in 1929, when a rocket of his crashed, attracting the local police and fire departments and the press. People began to complain about his rocket tests. The publicity about his work eventually caught the interest of the world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. With Lindbergh's help, Goddard moved his research lab from Massachusetts to Roswell, New Mexico. There he could conduct experiments in a more secluded but wide-open, tree-free environment. His rockets continued to fly higher and faster, and by the mid-1930s they had reached an altitude of almost two miles and had exceeded the speed of sound.
Goddard ended up creating the world's first flying, liquid-fuel rocket. He proved that liquid-fuel rockets provide much greater thrust (power). No gunpowder-based rockets can achieve such velocities, although modern solid-fuel rockets, using other propellants, can.
Unfortunately, Goddard's desire for secrecy and his shortcomings as an engineer greatly limited his influence on later rocketry. Still, his work made an impact on the world's imagination. Although many before him had dreamed about the possibility of spaceflight, Goddard's calculations and experiments proved that a properly designed rocket could indeed escape Earth's gravity. Indeed, some people have called Robert Goddard the "Father of the Space Age."
