Robert Hutchings Goddard
1882-1945
American Physicist
Goddard was an early advocate of rocketry and space travel and is one of the principal inventors of the liquid fluid rocket. Beginning in 1926 he was able to launch a series of successful rockets, eventually obtaining modest financial support for his work. Many of the concepts developed by him are used in current rocket design. Goddard's contribution to rocket science was only belatedly acknowledged by the United States government.
Robert Goddard, the son of a bookkeeper and machine shop operator, spent his childhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the period of rapid industrialization that followed the American Civil War. His interest in the possibility of space travel was apparently kindled in 1898, when he read the serialized version of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds that appeared in the Boston Post. He received his college education at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and went on to earn a doctorate from Clark University, also in Worcester. Following a year conducting research at Princeton University, he returned to Clark, an institution with which he would remain associated throughout his career.
Goddard began testing some of his ideas in the laboratory in 1912, obtaining two patents in 1914. In 1919 he published a small booklet entitled "A Method of Reaching Extremely High Altitudes." Goddard was the first to develop a liquid fuel rocket engine, launching the first liquid-fueled rocket from his aunt's farm in 1926. Goddard's initial tests were funded by the Smithsonian Institution. A second test in 1929 carrieda package of instruments to an even greater height, but also attracted the attention of the police. Local authorities forbade further rocket testing in Massachusetts.
Robert H. Goddard (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)At this point the famous aviator Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974) came to Goddard's aid. Lindbergh persuaded the philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to make a grant of $50,000 to Goddard. Goddard began a new series of tests at Roswell, New Mexico, with his rockets attaining an altitude of over 2 km (1.25 mi) by 1935. Goddard was unable, however, to interest the American military in the development of rocketry. During World War II, he received a small government stipend to perfect a small-scale rocket weapon, the bazooka, that he had designed during the First World War, and to work on rocket-assisted aircraft launches for the Navy.
Goddard's early interest in space flight was matched in Germany by Hermann Oberth (1984-1989), and in Russia by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935). All three worked independently, obtaining many of the same theoretical results, although by 1925 Oberth had begun to correspond with the other rocket researchers. While Goddard had been the first to experiment with liquid fuel rockets, the German rocket enthusiasts, with the support of the Nazi regime, were the first to extensively develop rockets, the V-1 and V-2, for military use. When, at the end of the Second World War, American agents interviewed captured German rocket scientists, they were surprised to learn just how much of the German rocket technology had been based on Goddard's ideas. The American government subsequently paid Goddard's estate one million dollars for the rights to use Goddard's more than 200 patents. Goddard's contribution to space exploration is commemorated in the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
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