100 years ago, physicist Robert Goddard designed and built the first liquid-fueled rocket. Powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen and launched from his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts on 1926 March 16, the first flight lasted 2.5 seconds and reached an altitude of 12.5 meters.
7 years earlier, in 1919, Goddard published the seminal treatise A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, whose final section is “Calculation of minimum mass required to raise one pound to an ‘infinite’ altitude”, including to the Moon. Goddard eschewed publicity, but his ideas were nonetheless widely ridiculed.
7 years earlier, in 1919, Goddard published the seminal treatise A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, whose final section is “Calculation of minimum mass required to raise one pound to an ‘infinite’ altitude”, including to the Moon. Goddard eschewed publicity, but his ideas were nonetheless widely ridiculed.
In 1920, an unsigned New York Times editorial denied that a rocket could work in a vacuum and suggested that Goddard “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” In 1929, a local newspaper mocked one of Goddard’s experiments with the headline “Moon rocket misses target by 298,799 ½ miles”.
Goddard remarked, “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”
Robert Goddard did not live to see the Space Age he helped create, but his wife Esther Goddard, who championed his work after his death, did live to see the 1969 July 16 launch of Apollo 11, which used a liquid-fueled rocket based on principles pioneered by Goddard to reach the Moon. The crew included Buzz Aldrin, the son of one of Goddard’s students.
The day after Apollo 11 launched, the New York Times corrected its 1920 error and acknowledged that rockets can fly in a vacuum (by expelling mass in one direction and recoiling in the opposite direction).
Robert Goddard and the first liquid-fueled rocket on 1926 March 8. (The combustion chamber is above the propellant tanks, but he reversed the order in later versions.) Photo by Esther Goddard.