The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

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Robert Hutchings Goddard (1882–1945)
An American physicist and a rocket pioneer.
Although historians point to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
and Hermann Oberth as being the
founders of rocket theory, Goddard, a native of
Worcester, Massachusetts, is generally regarded as the
father of the practical modern rocket. Yet it was only
after his death that the true value of his work was
widely recognized.
Goddard’s early attraction to rocketry is clear from
an autobiography written in 1927 but not published
until 1959, in which he recalls as a 17-year-old climbing
into a cherry tree to prune branches and finding
himself instead daydreaming of interplanetary travel:
It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of
sheer beauty which we have in October in New
England, and as I looked toward the fields at the
east, 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.
From this point on, Goddard’s ambition, to
develop the practical means of achieving spaceflight,
began to take shape. He earned his Ph.D. in physics at
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911,
and went on to become head of the Clark physics
department and director of its physical laboratories.
His first serious work on rocket development began in
1909, although it was not until 1915 that he carried
out his first actual experiments, involving solid-fueled
rockets, having already been granted patents covering
such key components as combustion chambers, nozzles,
propellant feed systems, and multistage launchers.
In 1916, the Smithsonian Institution awarded
him $5,000 to perform high-altitude tests. But a year
later, following the United States’ entry into World
War I, he found himself temporarily in California,
working on rockets as weapons, including the forerunner
of the bazooka.
In 1919 Goddard published the first of his two
important monologues on rocketry, A Method of
Attaining Extreme Altitude. Based on the report that
had earned him the Smithsonian grant, it was written
in typically cautious Goddard style. It would probably
have attracted little attention but for its final section,
“Calculation of Minimum Mass Required to Raise
One Pound to an ‘Infinite’ Altitude.” Despite Goddard’s
sober analysis of the problems involved in
sending a payload from Earth to the Moon and of
proving that the target could be reached (by an explosion
of flash powder), he was lampooned by the popular
press. However, he continued with his research
and moved into the field of liquid-fueled rockets. On
March 16, 1926, Goddard carried out the world’s first
launch of such a system, using a strange-looking, 3-mlong
rocket powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen
and gasoline ignited by a blowtorch. The device rose
for two-and-a-half seconds, reaching a height of 67 m
and a maximum speed of 96 km/hr before its fuel was
exhausted. His work eventually drew the attention of
Charles Lindbergh, who in 1929 arranged for a
$50,000 grant to the rocket pioneer from the Guggenheim
Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. Goddard’s
increasingly ambitious tests demanded more
Robert Goddard Goddard examining one of his larger
liquid-fueled engines. NASA