FIRST STEPS TOWARD SPACE - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

NUMBER 10 117
advise on the support given by the Foundation to
Goddard for the development of a sounding
rocket. 13 Millikan arranged for me to have a short
discussion with Goddard on 28 August, during
which I told him of our hopes and research plans. I
also arranged to visit him at Roswell, New Mexico,
the next month, when I was going for a holiday to
my parents' home in Brenham, Texas. 14 I believe it
was before Goddard's arrival in Pasadena that Millikan
had already written for me a letter of introduction
to him in connection with the possibility of
my visiting his Roswell station. 15
In Milton Lehman's biography of Goddard 10 appears
a rather strange and inaccurate account of my
visit to Roswell. No mention is made of the fact that
R. A. Millikan had arranged for me to meet with
Goddard during his visit to Caltech. Part of the
account by Lehman reads:
The Goddards had no sooner returned to Mescalero Ranch at
the end of August than they found one of Cal. Tech's
graduate students waiting to see the professor. The same day
Goddard received a note from Millikan asking him to extend
"all possible courtesies" to the young student, Frank J.
Malina.
My recollections of my visit to Roswell are that
both Dr. and Mrs. Goddard received me cordially.
My day with him consisted of a tour of his shop
(where I was not shown any components of his
sounding rocket), of a drive to his launching range
to see his launching tower and 2000-pound-thrust
static test stand, and of a general discussion during
and after lunch. He did not wish to to give any
technical details of his current work beyond that
which he had published in his 1936 Smithsonian
Institution report, with which I was already familiar.
This report, of a very general nature, was of
limited usefulness to serious students of the subject.
17 On 1 October 1936 I wrote to Goddard: 18
I have just returned to the Institute after several weeks in
Texas. I wish to thank you and your wife for the hospitality
shown me and you for your kindness in allowing me to
inspect that part of your work which you considered permissible
under the circumstances.
i I recall two special impressions he made on me.
The first was a bitterness towards the press. He
showed me a clipping of an editorial, which had
appeared in the New York Times years earlier (13
January 1920), that ridiculed him, saying that a
professor of physics should know better than to
make space flight proposals, as they violated a
fundamental law of dynamics. He appeared to
suffer keenly from such nonsense directed at him.
The second impression I obtained was that he
felt that rockets were his private preserve, so that
any others working on them took on the aspect of
intruders. He did not appear to realize that in other
countries were men who, independently of him, as
so frequently happens in the history of technology,
had arrived at the same basic ideas for rocket propulsion.
His attitude caused him to turn his back
on the scientific tradition of communication of
results through established scientific journals, and
instead he spent much time on patents, especially
after he published his classic Smithsonian Institution
report of 1919 on "A Method of Reaching Extreme
Altitudes." 19
As I departed, Goddard suggested that I come to
work with him at Roswell when I completed my
studies at Caltech. This was intriguing to me; but
by the time I completed my doctorate in 1940 we
had obtained governmental support for rocket research,
and were building an effective research
establishment.
A year later I wrote to Goddard in connection
with an analysis of the flight performance of a
sounding rocket with a constant thrust, which
Smith and I were carrying out. 20 To the request
for flight data on his rockets, he answered on 19
October 1937, as follows:
I have your letter of the fourteenth relative to data for
your study of vertical rocket flight.
The gyroscopically stabilized flights described in the report
to which you refer were, as therein stated, for stabilization
during the period of propulsion, and not thereafter, and the
trajectories were accordingly not vertical throughout the
flights. The data regarding heights and speeds, while sufficiently
accurate to describe the performance in general terms,
would therefore hardly be satisfactory for exact calculations
made under the assumption that the flights were vertical.
Further, thrusts were not measured when the rockets were
used for flights, and I have reason to believe that we did not
always have the high efficiencies, in flight, that we obtained
in certain of the static tests.
As stated in the paper, the main object was to obtain
stabilization and satisfactory performance in flight, and I
should prefer to have any analyses of performance made for
flights in which height was the main consideration. We have
had further stabilized flights since the paper was written, but
the work is not yet sufficiently complete for publication.
The rockets used in the flights described were all 9 inches
in diameter, and the initial altitude was about 4000 feet. 2 i
In a letter home dated 23 October, I wrote:
Smith and I are working on the performance paper sporad-