Robert Goddard

By Laura Whitfield

On March 16, 1926, in a snow-covered cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts, Robert Goddard lit a rocket that burned gasoline and liquid oxygen, and it rose forty-one feet into the air in two and a half seconds before crashing back to earth. It was the most consequential forty-one feet in the history of flight. Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University born in Worcester in 1882, had been dreaming of spaceflight since boyhood, when reading H. G. Wells sent him climbing a cherry tree to stare at the sky. In 1914 he patented the two ideas that made the space age possible: the multistage rocket and the liquid-fuel rocket engine. Solid gunpowder rockets had existed for centuries, but they could not be throttled, stopped, or scaled; only liquids, pumped and metered into a combustion chamber, could produce the sustained, controllable thrust needed to leave the atmosphere. Working almost entirely alone, funded by his family, by Clark, and eventually by the Guggenheim Foundation, Goddard built and flew the first liquid-fuel rockets, added gyroscopic stabilization, steering vanes, and parachute recovery, and by the 1930s was launching rockets to altitudes of nearly two miles in the New Mexico desert. The American press mocked him; a famous 1920 New York Times editorial declared that he did not understand action and reaction, that rockets could not work in a vacuum. The military ignored him. But in Germany, Wernher von Braun's team studied Goddard's patents closely, and the V-2 that rained on London was, in its essentials, Goddard's liquid-fuel architecture scaled up. After his death in 1945, the Times published a retraction. Every orbital rocket ever flown, from Sputnik's R-7 to the Saturn V to the Falcon 9, burns liquid fuel in a chamber Goddard first imagined, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland carries his name. The Guggenheim Foundation's support, beginning in 1930, gave Goddard what he had never had: sustained funding. He moved his work to the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, where his rockets grew steadily more sophisticated through the 1930s. In 1932 he flew the first rocket with gyroscopic stabilization; in 1935 one of his rockets reached 7,500 feet, a record at the time, and was recovered by parachute. He accumulated 214 patents, covering nearly every element of modern rocketry: fuel pumps, steering mechanisms, cooling systems, instrument compartments. During the Second World War he worked for the Navy on jet-assisted takeoff, helping heavy aircraft lift off short runways, practical engineering far from his dreams of the moon. He died in Baltimore in 1945 of throat cancer, just as the captured V-2 rockets were arriving in America and his vindication was beginning. The New York Times, which in 1920 had mocked his ignorance of Newton's third law, published a correction in 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched, admitting that further investigation had shown the criticism to have been wrong. It is one of the most famous retractions in the history of journalism, and it arrived twenty-four years too late for Goddard to read it.

Impact on civilization

The liquid-fuel rocket is the key that unlocked the door to space. Without throttlable, restartable liquid engines, there are no satellites, no GPS, no weather forecasting from orbit, no intercontinental ballistic missiles, no moon landings, no space stations, no Starlink. Goddard's patents sketched the entire architecture of the space age before the word astronautics existed: staging to shed dead weight, liquid propellants for efficiency, guidance to steer. His work also demonstrates the strange economy of invention, in which the prophet is ignored at home and read carefully abroad; American rocketry had to be rebuilt in the 1950s from foundations he had poured in the 1920s. Every phone that finds its position from satellites is, at several removes, using Goddard's machine. Goddard's story also became the archetype of the ignored prophet in American science, taught to every engineering student as a warning about institutional conservatism. The pattern he embodied, the lone researcher decades ahead of the establishment, funded by private visionaries while the military looked elsewhere, repeated with the jet engine, the transistor's early years, and the internet's predecessors. His patents, filed when no one was watching, became some of the most valuable intellectual property of the space age, studied in Germany during the war and cited by American engineers for decades after.