Robert Goddard’s Dream Launched America’s Efforts in Space

By Bob Granath

It was a colorful autumn afternoon in New England. A teenager climbed a cherry tree at his parents’ home to cut off dead limbs. As evening fell and stars became visible, he gazed into the sky imagining how “wonderful it would be to make some device that had even the possibility of ascending to Mars.” With that dream, Robert Goddard’s inspiration gave birth to America’s efforts to explore space.

“I was a different boy when I descended the tree,” Goddard said about his experience on Oct. 19, 1899. As a 17-year-old, he was fascinated by Jules Vern’s 1865 book, From Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’ newly published novel The War of the Worlds. Goddard would go on to develop technology used in every rocket lunched by NASA and most other nations around the world.

As a physicist, inventor and engineer, Goddard created and built the world’s first liquid-propellant rocket, a crucial innovation making possible flight into the vacuum of outer space. That initial successful test took place one hundred years ago — March 16, 1926. Goddard’s advancements in this fledgling technology led to him being considered by many as the “Father of Modern Rocketry.”

Goddard not only recognized the potential of rockets for atmospheric research, ballistic missiles and space travel, but also was the first to study designs while constructing and launching early rockets to implement his concepts. Prior to Goddard’s invention, rockets were powered by gunpowder eventually evolving in medieval China during the 13th century. These fireworks-type devices were used in celebrations as well as in war.

In 1804, English Army officer Sir William Congreve developed an artillery version that carried his name. It was Congreve rockets American lawyer Francis Scott Key referred to when he witnessed the “rockets’ red glare” and wrote The Star-Spangled Banner while held captive on a British ship that was laying siege to Fort McHenry in 1814.

However, such missiles required the oxygen in the atmosphere to operate. To function in the vacuum of space, a rocket would need to take along oxidizer. Goddard made the dream of spaceflight with rockets possible by combining gasoline and liquid oxygen.

A Country Boy

Goddard was born Oct. 5, 1882, in Worcester, Massachusetts, but his family moved to Boston when he was a small child. After his mother contracted tuberculosis in 1898, the family moved back to Worcester for the clear air. They lived a quiet life there, attending the local Episcopal church where young Goddard sang in the choir.

Growing up he considered himself a country boy who loved the outdoors and hiking with his father. During his early teens, he developed a curiosity about nature studying stars using his father’s telescope. Encouraging this interest, the elder Goddard gave him a subscription to Scientific American magazine.

Like his mother, Goddard suffered from numerous health problems. So much so, that he fell behind in his education. However, his strength improved and he excelled in high school studies, twice being elected class president. At his graduation ceremony in 1904, he spoke as his class valedictorian and revealed his visionary thinking.

“It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow,” he said.

Goddard went on to attend Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he quickly impressed professors with his interest in physics while earning a bachelor’s degree in 1908. After serving there for a year as an instructor, he began his graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester where he received a master’s in physics in 1910. He completed his doctorate in the same subject the following year.

In 1912, Goddard accepted a research fellowship at Princeton University. In his spare time, he developed the mathematics to calculate the position and velocity of a rocket in vertical flight, factoring the weight of the rocket and propellant with the velocity of the exhaust gases.

“The solution that was obtained revealed the fact that surprisingly small initial masses would be necessary,” he wrote, “provided the gases were ejected from the rocket at a high velocity and also provided that most of the rocket’s weight consisted of propellant.”

Goddard was correct. The Saturn V rockets that launched American astronauts to Moon landing missions during the 1960s and 1970s were more than 85 percent propellant. At liftoff, the vehicle weighed approximately 6.4 million pounds. Of that, 5.6 million pounds was RP-1 kerosene, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

The year after Goddard began work at Princeton, he became seriously ill with tuberculosis and returnes home to Worcester. He spent time outside in the fresh air, even in winter, and walked for exercise. He gradually improved. During his recuperation, he began to produce some of his most important work.

With his health better, Goddard accepted a part-time position as an instructor and research fellow at Clark University in1914. He continued research in rockets ordering numerous supplies to build rocket prototypes.

In the Clark physics laboratory, Goddard conducted static tests of gun powder rockets to measure their thrust and efficiency. He found his earlier estimates to be verified. Solid propellant rockets were converting only about two percent of the thermal energy into thrust and energy. To improve thrust, he used a nozzle pinched in the middle to accelerate a compressible fluid to supersonic speeds in the thrust’s direction.

By 1915, Goddard obtained an average efficiency of 40 percent. Connecting a combustion chamber full of gunpowder to various converging-diverging expansion nozzles, Goddard was able in static tests to achieve engine efficiencies of more than 63 percent.

Landmark Publication

As the cost of testing mounted, Goddard sought funding from organizations with an interest in science and technology. In 1917, the Smithsonian Institution requested Goddard elaborate on his concepts. He responded by writing a landmark publication entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. The Smithsonian issued Goddard’s revolutionary work in late 1919. The report described Goddard’s mathematical theories of rocket flight and his experiments with solid fuel rockets. The result led him to believe in the possibility of exploring Earth’s atmosphere and space travel.

Goddard’s fellow Clark scientists were astonished when the Smithsonian provided a five-year grant of $5,000 (about $94,000 today) and the university’s leadership contributed $3,500. Additionally, Worcester Polytechnic Institute allowed him to use its abandoned Magnetics Laboratory on the edge of campus as a safe place for testing. Some of his colleagues did not consider his research “real science.”

Smithsonian aerospace historian Frank Winter stated that together with Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s 1903 work, The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Rocket Devices, Goddard’s report is regarded as one of the pioneering works of the science of rocketry. Winter believes that the two papers were “key catalysts behind the international rocket movement of the 1920s and ‘30s.”

One of those who requested and received a copy of Goddard’s paper was German physicist and rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. In 1923, he published The Rocket into Planetary Space while a memberof Germany’s Society for Spaceflight. This amateur rocketry group was inspired by Goddard’s and Oberth’s books. Society enthusiasts, such as Wernher von Braun, would apply these concepts hoping to explore space with larger rockets. However, their new technology would be put to use in what the world came to know as the V-2 guided missile.

Back in the United States, Goddard avoided publicity and shared his ideas only with groups he trusted. He generally spoke about the rocket principles and their use for atmospheric research and photographing the Moon and planets by rocket-powered fly-by probes.

But the editorial board of the New York Times was not impressed.

“That professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd,” the Times wrote in a 1920 editorial. “Space travel is impossible, since without atmosphere to push against, a rocket could not move so much as an inch. Professor Goddard, it is clear, lacks knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

The New York Times misunderstood Sir Issac Newton’s “Third Law of Motion” published in 1687.

“For every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction,” the English physicist wrote. This means it is a rocket’s exhaust pushing against itself that propels it forward.

Goddard simply responded, “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it. Once realized, it becomes commonplace.”

A few decades later, the Times editorial board admitted their mistake on July 21, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 placed the first men on the Moon.

“Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere,” the editors said. “The Times regrets the error.”

Historic Milestone

During the period between 1924 and 25, Goddard developed a high-pressure piston pump to send fuel to a rocket’s combustion chamber. A major step forward occurred on Dec. 6, 1925, when Goddard tested the simpler pressure feed system in a static test on the firing stand at the Clark University physics laboratory. The engine lifted its own weight in a 27-second test, proving a liquid fuel rocket was feasible.

On March 16, 1926, Goddard took his prototype rocket to a field in nearby Auburn, Massachusetts. He was accompanied by Henry Sachs, his machinist and crew chief, Percy Roope, Clark’s assistant professor of physics, and his wife, Esther Goddard, who became his principal photographer.

The rocket climbed 41 feet in the air during a 2.5-second flight landing 184 feet away. It was a simple test. But that day Dr. Robert Goddard launched the technology of a new age in which humanity could, for the first time, reach and explore beyond Earth.

In his typical understated manner, Goddard wrote about it in his test log.

“The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn,” he wrote. “The flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame and then, at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.”

Testing continued with gradual increases in the size and complexity of the rockets. On July 7, 1929, Goddard and his small team launched an 11-foot, 35-pound rocket in a field in Auburn. It rose 80 feet in the air and landed 171 feet from its launch site. While the experiment successfully achieved its goal of testing engine and guidance systems, the rocket’s gasoline fuel tank exploded on impact. People reported hearing the “racket” as far as two miles away.

Goddard, his wife and team members were surprised to see about a dozen vehicles, including two ambulances and a fire truck. Two police officers reported that they were responding to a report of a “crashed aeroplane.” The rocket scientist assured the officials that it was a simple rocket test that had been completed and no one was hurt.

However, the next day the Worcester Evening Gazette headline blared, “GODDARD EXPERIMENTAL ROCKET EXPLODES IN AIR. A sub headline read, “Noise of Blast Heard for Miles.” Other publications published similar reports of a “catastrophe.” Additional stories appeared in the New York Times and Time magazine.

Visionary Partners

Although Goddard assured local fire marshals that his tests were perfectly safe in an open area, he was summoned to appear before state officials in Boston. He was told that rocket testing now was forbidden in Massachusetts. While such publicity was both unwanted and inaccurate, it caught the attention of the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Charles Lindbergh read the story in the New York Times. Since he was interested in the future of both aviation and space flight, he contacted Goddard in November of 1929 and they soon met in Goddard’s office at Clark University. The two quickly formed a trust and friendship.

Lindbergh began looking for additional financing for Goddard’s research with proposals to industry and private investors. The timing could not have been worse as it was immediately following the stock market crash of October 1929.

In early 1930, Lindbergh found interest from financier Daniel Guggenheim who wanted to fund Goddard’s research over a four-year period. His offer totaled $100,000 ($2.4 million today). One of Goddard’s physics students at Clark University assisted Lindbergh by documenting Goddard’s experiments. This helped secure funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The student, Edwin Aldrin, Sr., was the father of NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin who landed on the Moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969.

Now barred from further rocket testing in his home state, Goddard consulted with a meteorologist for a place with wide-open spaces and a moderate climate where his work would rarely be interrupted by weather. Roswell, New Mexico seemed ideal. The dry air also would be helpful due to the damage to his lungs by his earlier bout with tuberculosis.

Once set up to work in the New Mexico desert, Goddard’s rockets took on the familiar look with a smooth casing with tail fins. In April 1932, a newly designed rocket included a guidance system with gyroscopes mounted on gimbals for additional steering controlling vanes in the exhaust. The rocket crashed after going up a short distance, but the new system worked and he considered the test a success.

In the years to come, Goddard’s experiments achieved numerous breakthroughs in rocket technology that are widely used today.

• In 1915, Goddard was the first to prove that rocket propulsion operates in a vacuum, which was doubted by some scientists of that time.
• He was the first to prove that an oxidizer and a fuel could be mixed using injectors and burned controllably in a combustion chamber, something also doubted by physicists.
• Goddard was the first to test regenerative cooling of the engine’s thrust chamber. In this configuration, some of the liquid oxygen propellant (at -294 degrees F) is passed through tubes in a jacket around the engine nozzle for cooling.
• In 1929, he was the first to launch a scientific payload (a barometer, a thermometer and a camera) in a rocket flight.
• In 1937, he was the first to launch a rocket successfully steered with a gimbled engine by moving the tail section controlled by a gyroscope mechanism.

By 1941, Goddard’s rockets reached altitudes greater than 1.6 miles achieving speeds of 550 mph. He built more advanced turbopumps for larger rockets that were lighter and more reliable while carrying scientific instruments. However, World War II intervened.

Rockets Go to War

Just before the United States entered the conflict, the U.S. Navy asked Goddard to develop a jet-assisted take-off, or JATO, rocket at the Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis, Maryland. The boost system was for a patrol bomber known as the “PBY.” It was an amphibious aircraft with a long operational range. With the war in the Pacific Ocean, troops would require resupply flights over great distances. By May 1942, Goddard designed a unit that could meet the Navy’s requirements and be able to launch a heavily loaded aircraft from a short runway.

In spite of the success of Goddard’s JATO rockets, the Navy had no interest in the greater potential of long-range missiles. Instead, the Navy asked him to perfect the throttleable JATO engine. The unit was able to be stopped and restarted, and it produced a medium thrust of 600 pounds for 15 seconds and a full thrust of 1,000 pounds for over 15 seconds. After the war, the engine would become the basis of the Curtiss-Wright company’s 15,000-pound thrust variable-thrust engine that powered the Bell X-2 rocket plane. In September 1956, the research aircraft reached 126,000 feet altitude and exceeded Mach 3 – three times the speed of sound.

In the spring of 1945, Goddard was given the opportunity to thoroughly inspect a German V-2 ballistic missile captured by the U.S. Army and brought to the naval laboratory in Annapolis. He was convinced that their rocket team had “stolen” his concepts. While the design was similar to Goddard’s, it was technically more advanced than his most successful rockets.

After Dr. Wernher von Braun and many of his team surrendered to American Army forces in Europe, he was asked how they developed such advanced technology.

“Don’t you know about your own rocket pioneer?” he said having iodized the American rocket scientist since his youth. “Dr. Goddard was ahead of us all.”

After becoming an early advocate for American space exploration, von Braun often praised Goddard’s work.

“(His) rockets may have been rather crude by today’s standards, but they blazed the trail (for) our most modern rockets and space vehicles,” he said.

Goddard’s earlier bout with tuberculosis weakened his lungs and was one reason he liked to work alone. After moving to the humid climate of coastal Maryland, his health began to deteriorate. His wife, Ester, encouraged him to continue his work back in the more arid climate of New Mexico. But, he was patriotic about supporting his county’s war efforts. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1945. He continued to work, able to speak only in a whisper until surgery was required. He died on August 10 of that year.

Just weeks after Goddard’s passing, von Braun, the V-2’s technical director, and 115 of his German colleagues arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas to begin rocket testing at the nearby White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. They continued Goddard’s work in the desert southwest until they were moved in 1950 to develop larger launch vehicles at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama and launching them from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Many of those who played key roles in developing space flight technology spoke of Goddard’s crucial contributions.

“(He was) one of the greatest engineers of the 20th Century – whose work helped change the future,” wrote British physicist and science writer, Sir Arthur C. Clark.

Famed NASA flight director, Christopher Kraft, who retired as director of the agency’s Johnson Space Center, praised Goddard’s “stick-to-itiveness.”

“Robert Goddard was among the elite group of scientists in the United States whose pioneering work in rocket propulsion provided the base from which today’s space exploration was created,” he said.

Like von Braun, Gemini and Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell said that Goddard was his boyhood hero.

“From an early age, rockets fascinated me,” he said. “I read Goddard’s published texts in high school. I wanted to become a rocket engineer. Robert Goddard was the visionary who laid the path for America’s ventures into space.”

In 1932, Goddard wrote to H. G. Wells, one of the authors who inspired him as a teenager.

“How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem, I do not know; I hope, as long as I live,” he said. “There can be no thought of finishing, for aiming at the stars, both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations. So that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.”

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Goddard’s Legacy Continues at Key NASA Space Center

By Bob Granath

On March 16, 1961, the 35th anniversary of the first liquid propellant rocket launch, NASA opened the Robert H. Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At the sprawling complex, the largest single organization of scientists and engineers design spacecraft and develop new technology to study Earth, Sun, solar system and beyond.

Located about 6.5 miles northeast of Washington, D.C., the center was established in August 1958 as a “Space Projects Center” as part of the Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. Following Congressional passage of the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, the Naval Research Laboratory’s Project Vanguard was transferred to the “Beltsville Space Center.”

While serving as chief or Guided Missile Development for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Wernher von Braun advocated for recognition of America’s first space pioneer. On May 1, 1959, Beltsville was formally named the Goddard Space Flight Center for the newly established federal agency – NASA.

Today, Goddard employs thousands of civil servants and contractors. The center’s specialists operate the Space Network and the Near Earth Network. These tracking and data acquisition links maintain advanced space and Earth science communications systems, as well as satellite systems for organizations such as NOAA — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Goddard also manages communications for satellites, probes traveling beyond Earth orbit and human spaceflight missions. This includes data transmitted between Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center and orbiting astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Historic programs supported by Goddard teams include TIROS I, for Television Infrared Observation Satellite, launched in April 1960. It was the world’s first weather satellite. Once in orbit, it allowed meteorologists to view large features of Earth’s weather systems utilizing Goddard data transmission systems.

Studies of grainy black and white images of clouds evolved to crystal clear photographs of interstellar objects. Since its dedication in 1990, Goddard has provided ground support for the Earth orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Beginning in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope operates a million miles from Earth. Both observatories have become revolutionary instruments aiding thousands of astronomers, increasing their understanding of the universe with landmark discoveries.

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