The Rocket Man
IT ALL BEGAN ON AN AUTUMN DAY in 1899 behind the family home in Worcester, Massachusetts. The seventeenyear-old Robert Goddard had climbed a cherry tree to trim some dead branches with a saw and hatchet. Up in that tree he was possessed by an idea that was to propel him on a lifelong path.
“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,” the adult Goddard recorded in a 1927 autobiographical sketch. “I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive.” Thereafter Goddard referred to October 19 in his diaries as Anniversary Day. He kept photos of the cherry tree and the ladder he had used to climb it, and he would visit the cherry tree each year on October 19 when he was in the area.
Robert Hatchings Goddard labored almost his entire adult life to bring the heavens within reach. He patented most of the basic features of the rockets that have carried astronauts to the moon and robot probes to Mars and beyond. He showed that rockets could operate in a vacuum, launched the first liquidfueled rocket, and even invented a prototype of the bazooka. Today he is often called the father of modern rocketry. History places him with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany in the triumvirate of visionaries credited with laying the conceptual and practical foundations of space travel.
“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."
Goddard was one of the last of the bigtime lone-wolf inventors. He seldom published his results and refused to collaborate, working only with a handful of hired technicians. His concern for secrecy bordered on the paranoid. Indeed, his insistence on working alone may have ensured his place as the undisputed father of modern rocketry, but that insularity seems also to have sharply limited his experimental success and his concrete contributions to technology.
HE WAS BORN IN 1882 TO NAHUM and Fannie Hoyt Goddard. The family spent his early years in the Boston suburb of Roxbury. His father co-owned a company that manufactured machine knives, and during his career he invented a new type of machine knife for cutting rabbit fur as well as a flux for welding steel and iron. Nahum Goddard encouraged his son’s interest in science, supplying him with a telescope, a microscope, and a subscription to Scientific American .
When Fanny fell ill with tuberculosis in 1898, a doctor recommended fresh air and rest, so the Goddards moved to the family farmhouse in Worcester. They shared the house with Goddard’s great-aunt and with George and Ella Boswell, friends of the family. Bob called Boswell “Uncle George” and said he “could do wonderful little things about the house with wire and pieces of zinc, and his neat little workshop and tool cabinet in the shed were an unending feast to my eyes.”
Later that year Goddard made his fateful ascent of the cherry tree. With the call of the stars ringing in his head, he immediately began making plans: “It seemed to me then that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by virtue of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path.” A college student he met on a trip to Boston pointed out the problem with his planned device, but Goddard remained unconvinced until he conducted his own experiments with rubber bands and floats, at which point he “began to think there might be something after all to Newton’s laws.”
Clearly he would have to give the problem more thought. “It made me realize that if a way to navigate space were to be discovered—or invented—it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics…. I resolved forthwith that I would shine in these subjects.” He aced physics and led his class in geometry. He spent free time in the school’s laboratory and received advanced instruction from his physics teacher. Though not exactly outgoing, Goddard was no socially inept science nerd. He served two terms as class president, edited the school newspaper, played the piano, acted in school plays, and sang in a quartet.
He entered Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the fall of 1904 (his schooling had been prolonged by repeated illness) and plunged eagerly into his studies. While at WPI he wrote an article called “The Use of the Gyroscope in the Balancing and Steering of Airplanes” that was published in Scientific American . In his notebooks he scrawled voluminous speculations on space flight, including the use of solar and atomic energy to power spacecraft. To minimize a spacecraft’s weight, he conceived a series of nested cannons, essentially an embryonic version of the idea of multistage rockets.
In 1908 he embarked on graduate studies in physics at Clark University, also in Worcester. After earning his Ph.D. in 1911 and staying on for a year as a research fellow, he accepted a fellowship at Princeton University to study electricity, magnetism, and atomic theory. He worked diligently during the day on his assigned research and devoted evenings and many late nights to rocket propulsion. While visiting his family in Worcester for Easter in 1913, he came down with what he shrugged off as a slight cold. He treated it with an old family remedy: snuff and lard. It turned out to be tuberculosis. A doctor told his parents that he had about two weeks to live.
Goddard was bedridden for several weeks but failed to die on schedule. In the spring his doctor reluctantly gave him permission to work for an hour each afternoon. He recovered, but his health remained fragile for the rest of his life. During his long convalescence Goddard completed two applications for patents, which were granted the following year. These landmark patents described multistage rockets and rockets powered by liquid and solid fuels and outlined methods of feeding fuels into a rocket’s combustion chamber.
“Blue-sky patents,” his lawyer, Charles Hawley, called them. “They covered the universe, pretty near.” In essence they described fundamental features of the rockets that would later carry satellites, probes, and astronauts into space. The basic principle of rocket propulsion—in which a rapidly burning fuel shoots out one end of a cylinder, pushing it in the opposite direction with great speed—was not new in itself, of course. Fireworks and weapons using the effect had been known since the Middle Ages. But these were all solid-fuel rockets burning black powder. They were fine for reaching heights of a hundred feet or so, but too heavy to go much higher, and there was no way to keep the powder burning for more than a few seconds. The vastly greater energy density of liquid fuels, combined with Goddard’s ideas for multiple stages and sustained feeding of fuel into the combustion chamber, would one day allow rockets to leave the earth’s atmosphere entirely.
IN THE FALL OF 1914 GODDARD joined the physics faculty at Clark as a part-time instructor, turning down offers from Princeton and Columbia because the light teaching load would give him more time to pursue his rocket studies. He proved to be a popular and dedicated teacher, his lectures sometimes concluding with a cheer from his students. One of his students was Edwin Aldrin, Sr., the father of astronaut “Buzz” Aldrin, the second human being to walk on the moon. Goddard also embarked on a series of experiments aimed at supporting and extending the theoretical work covered in his patents. First he measured the efficiency of ordinary black-powder rockets, including fireworks and signal flares used by ships at sea. The best he found, Coston rockets, which were used to fling lifelines to ships in distress, had an efficiency of only 2.5 percent, meaning that 97.5 percent of the energy in the fuel was wasted. He got better results by switching from black powder to smokeless powder and packing it more tightly.
In a series of static tests, Goddard measured the thrust obtained by using various kinds of nozzles and a steel combustion chamber, which permitted higher pressures. After several dozen experiments he managed to achieve ejection velocities of nearly 8,000 feet per second. Goddard’s static rockets were the most efficient heat engines of his day, more efficient by far than the best steam and internalcombustion engines.
Goddard had no doubt that rockets could reach the edge of the earth’s atmosphere. But what about the airless void beyond? Some scientists maintained that a rocket could not function in a vacuum because it would have nothing to push against. Goddard sought to demonstrate otherwise: He built a vacuum chamber and tested the efficiency of a rocket engine in vacuo . The rocket engine not only worked in the vacuum; it worked some 20 percent better than in air.
In the fall of 1916 Goddard wrote to the Smithsonian Institution, outlining his rocket research and its importance to science, especially meteorology, as well as to warfare. He asserted that with funding for equipment and assistants he could develop a rocket capable of reaching an altitude of several hundred miles. He received a grant of $5,000.
Though a rocket fueled by liquid hydrogen and oxygen seemed the most promising approach, using those chemicals would be expensive and dangerous. Goddard focused his efforts instead on rockets fueled by smokeless powder. He envisioned a sort of vertical machine gun involving an elaborate loading mechanism that would continually feed blocks of solid fuel into a combustion chamber. The scheme turned out to be a bit too complicated. In a discouraging series of tests, his loading mechanism kept jamming, warping, blowing up, or doing nothing at all.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1917, the United States entered the war in Europe. Goddard offered his services to the military, suggesting that he could develop powerful artillery rockets and even a sonar-like “submarine detector.” The U.S. Army Signal Corps, working through the Smithsonian, upped Goddard’s research grant by $20,000.
After working in Worcester for the first half of 1918, Goddard and two assistants relocated to the Mount Wilson astronomical observatory in Pasadena, California, in June. There they continued to work on the problematic loading mechanism as well as a series of small single-charge rockets. One of these could be launched from a lightweight tube—a forerunner of the bazooka introduced in World War II. It gave a single soldier the same firepower as a field cannon, and since the projectile was self-propelled, there was little recoil.
The weapon greatly impressed military observers, who assured Goddard that more funds would be headed his way. Four days later the armistice was signed in Europe. With peace at hand the military lost interest in developing exotic new weapons. Goddard went back to Worcester and his original $5,000 grant, which was nearly depleted.
At the urging of Arthur Webster, head of the physics department at Clark, Goddard used some of his Smithsonian money to publish a detailed account of his research to date. The 1919 report, entitled “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” laid out Goddard’s theoretical and experimental work in painstaking detail, arguing that if a rocket could be made light enough, so that most of its weight was in the form of fuel, it could accelerate sufficiently to break free from earth’s gravity and hurtle forever through space, to what Goddard called “infinite altitude.”
This highly technical document would probably have generated little interest among the general public had it not been for a Smithsonian publicist who wrote a press release highlighting Goddard’s hypothetical discussion of sending a rocket loaded with flash powder to the moon, where it would ignite on impact, providing visible confirmation that the device had reached its target.
Front-page newspaper stories across the nation in early 1920 seized on the fantasy that Goddard was about to launch such a rocket. Reporters dogged him, and dozens of people from around the world volunteered to be passengers or protested the possibility of killing the moon’s inhabitants. An amusement park in the Bronx offered the use of its facilities to host the first moon shot. An editorial in The New York Times commented that Goddard seemed to be unaware that a rocket could not function in a vacuum. “Of course,” the editorialist wrote, “he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” (In July 1969, with astronauts about to land on the moon, the Times printed a retraction.)
“From that day, the whole thing was summed up, in the public mind, in the words ‘moon rocket,’” Goddard wrote. To quell the sensation, he released a statement reporting on the actual state of his research. He added that $50,000 to $100,000 would go a long way toward advancing his work. A second report to the Smithsonian, unpublished until after Goddard’s death, contained even more extravagant speculations: manned space flight, remote-operated space probes, solar sails, ion propulsion, and even communication with extraterrestrial intelligences.
While Goddard’s imagination ranged widely, he was nowhere near actually launching a rocket to infinite altitude. He was still struggling with his mechanism to feed cartridges of fuel into a rocket’s combustion chamber. “One thing would go wrong after another,” said his mechanic, Nils Riffolt. “He’d come in with pencil sketches on the backs of envelopes and we’d talk over ways to handle the problem. After a while, we knew we were running down rabbit trails, that a workable cartridge rocket was at least a long way off.” In addition to his work at Worcester, Goddard spent weekends and school vacations from 1920 to 1923 at the Navy’s Indian Head Powder Factory in Maryland, developing depth-charge and armorpiercing rockets for the Bureau of Ordnance.
AROUND 1921 HE GAVE UP ON BUILD ing a high-altitude solid-fuel rocket and set his sights on developing a rocket engine using a liquid propellant, usually ether or gasoline, with pure liquid oxygen as oxidizer. While dangerous to work with, liquid fuels generated far more energy per pound than smokeless powder. And feeding two liquids into the combustion chamber presented a simpler mechanical challenge than perfecting his complicated apparatus for loading solid-fuel charges.
Goddard secured a less-than-adequate supply of liquid oxygen, or “lox,” from the Linde Air Products Company, which produced it as a by-product of manufacturing supplies for oxyacetylene welding. He and Riffolt set up shop in a sheet-iron shack outside the basement of the physics department building at Clark. “We figured that if anything went wrong,” said Riffolt, “we would merely blow up the outbuilding and not the whole department of physics.”
Meanwhile Goddard warded off requests for more information about his work and maintained tight security at his laboratory. He hired an armed watchman, got an unlisted telephone number for the lab, and made his assistants sign a pledge of secrecy. Hermann Oberth, in Germany, beseeched Goddard in 1922 to share his research because “only by common work of the scholars of all nations can be solved this great problem.” The suggestion unnerved Goddard. When he received a copy of Oberth’s 1923 treatise Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space), Goddard suspected that Oberth had stolen some of his ideas. “I am not surprised that Germany has awakened to the importance and the development possibilities of the work,” he wrote in an anxious memo to the Smithsonian, “and I would not be surprised if it were only a matter of time before the research would become something in the nature of a race.”
Charles Abbot, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, told Goddard in 1923 that his speculations “make very interesting reading. I am, however, consumed with impatience, and hope that you will be able to actually send a rocket up into the air some time soon. Interplanetary space would look much nearer to me after I had seen one of your rockets go up five or six miles in our own atmosphere.”
While Goddard forged ahead with his lox rocket, his personal life took a new turn in 1924, when he married Esther Kisk, who at twenty-three was twenty years younger than Goddard. They had met in 1919, when he hired her to type the manuscript of “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.” Esther, whose considerable intellect attracted Goddard as much as her youthful beauty, became an invaluable aide, working as his secretary, bookkeeper, photographer, nrefighter, and laboratory assistant. She also put up with her husband’s habit of spending much of the household budget on equipment for rocket research.
Goddard’s first liquid-fuel rocket consisted of a skeletal framework of tubing, with the combustion chamber and nozzle at one end, the gasoline and oxygen tanks at the other, and several feet of empty space in between. The chamber and nozzle were positioned above the tank, so the nozzle expelled torch-bright exhaust gases onto the fuel tank, which had to be protected by a cone-shaped shield. (Goddard thought this awkward arrangement would provide greater stability.) In December 1925 he ignited the engine in a static testing rack, where it rose under its own power for about twenty-seven seconds.
THE FOLLOWING MARCH GODDARD DROVE OUT TO the farm of a family friend in the nearby town of Auburn, accompanied by his new machinist, Henry Sachs, who had replaced Riffolt. They spent the cold morning setting up the rocket and its launch frame on a snowcovered patch of ground. Around noon Esther Goddard showed up with Percy Roope, a physics professor at Clark. The farm’s owner, Effie Ward, offered everyone cups of hot malted milk.
Goddard ignited the engine with the flame of an alcohol stove, then joined the others behind a sheet-iron barricade. “Even though the release was pulled,” Goddard wrote, “the rocket did not rise at first, but 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.”
On its only voyage the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket, which weighed six pounds empty and ten and a half when filled with fuel, reached a height of 41 feet. After a flight of two and a half seconds, it crashed 184 feet from the launch frame. It was a long way from infinite altitude, but Mrs. Goddard deemed the launch a success: “We slogged jubilantly through the mud of Aunt Effie’s cabbage patch toward the broken and twisted wreckage.”
Goddard’s report to the Smithsonian urged Abbot to make no public announcement of the launch. He noted with concern the strong interest in rocket propulsion in Germany. “Rocket work is being made almost a national issue in Germany, a novel having been written, playing upon race feeling, in which Germany is urged to support the development of a German liquid-propelled rocket, which, the readers are given to understand, is a German idea. Nearly every day, I am in receipt of requests from Germany for information and details.” The flight of the first liquidfueled rocket remained secret until 1936, when Goddard published a second Smithsonian report on his research.
Goddard built a liquid-fueled rocket some twenty times the size of the first. Working on this scale introduced new problems. The challenge was to fashion a combustion chamber that was both light in weight and able to withstand the intense heat of the burning fuel. Goddard therefore devised a “curtain cooling” system that protected the inner surface of the chamber with an insulating film of liquid fuel, either gasoline or lox.
It was a brilliant innovation that would become standard in high-altitude rockets and missiles. Unfortunately Goddard himself never got curtain cooling to work very reliably, for the thin-walled combustion chamber kept burning through. Multifarious technical problems kept the new rocket from ever getting off the ground. In one discouraging test the gasoline tank exploded.
IN 1929 GODDARD TESTED A LESS AMBI tious and less costly rocket measuring 11½ feet in length and weighing 32 pounds without fuel. It was equipped with a thermometer, a barometer, a camera to photograph the instruments at the apex of the rocket’s flight, and a parachute to bring the payload safely back to earth.
On the afternoon of July 17 the rocket roared out of the 60-foot launch tower Goddard and his assistants had built on Aunt Effie’s farm. It climbed 90 feet before leveling off. The parachute failed to deploy and the rocket hit the ground with an impressive explosion.
While Goddard and the others poked through the wreckage, several police officers, two ambulances, and a couple of newspaper reporters converged on the scene, summoned by reports of a fiery plane crash. The state fire marshal declared Goddard’s rocket tests a fire hazard and ordered him to carry out his experiments somewhere else.
For half a year Goddard worked at Camp Devens, a military installation twenty-five miles from Worcester, near an artillery range and a stagnant body of water called Hell Pond. The War Department let Goddard conduct tests only when the ground was rain-soaked or covered with snow. The rugged, unpaved road to the test site jarred Goddard’s delicate equipment, often forcing him to spend hours on tedious repairs and adjustments. Soldiers sometimes stole apparatus as well.
Under these conditions Goddard made frustratingly little progress. In late 1929, however, he had gotten a call from Charles Lindbergh, who had become a national hero two years before by piloting Spirit of St. Louis on the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh had read newspaper accounts of Goddard’s run-in with the fire marshal. He was interested in the potential of rockets to increase the range and speed of aircraft, and he asked Goddard if he could visit him in Worcester the next day.
He agreed, and the normally secretive Goddard eagerly discussed his ideas with Lindbergh. He screened a brief movie Esther had taken of his July test flight. He talked about launching rockets out of the atmosphere and sending human passengers far into space, even to the stars.
Lindbergh asked Goddard what he needed to advance his work. Goddard told him that he required an out-of-the-way place to test his rockets. And he needed money, of course—enough to support himself and his wife so he wouldn’t have to teach, and to pay for assistants and equipment. For the last decade and a half he had been limping along on erratic funding from Clark, the Navy, the Smithsonian, and the Carnegie Foundation. The lack of a steady source of money forced him to lead a hand-to-mouth existence. With an assured $25,000 a year, Goddard said, he might accomplish in four years what would otherwise take a lifetime.
Lindbergh recalled later that Goddard “spoke as though such an amount was part of a dream beyond realization.” Lindbergh knew better. He went to Daniel Guggenheim, the copper tycoon and philanthropist, and persuaded him to support Goddard’s research with a four-year $100,000 grant.
No longer tied to the Worcester area, Goddard searched for an ideal place to conduct his work. He needed level ground, good visibility, decent weather year-round, and lots of open space. A Clark University meteorologist suggested a high plateau in southeastern New Mexico. “You might try somewhere around the town of Roswell,” he said.
For Goddard’s tubercular lungs, the clear, dry air of Roswell was just what the doctor had ordered. The Goddards rented a large, run-down ranch from Effie Olds of the Oldsmobile family. Goddard got permission from a neighbor to launch his rockets on a 16,000-acre stretch of land called Eden Valley. He described the terrain as a “world of alkaline gray, holy, profane, grim although exquisite with a haunting stillness.” On occasion he would set up an easel in the desert and try to capture the landscape on canvas.
Goddard’s team rebuilt the 60-foot launch tower he had used in Auburn and Hell Pond. Beneath the tower they placed a large concrete trough to deflect the blasts of the rockets. He resolved to pull off at least one launch by the end of 1930. The new rocket, 11 feet long and weighing 33Vi pounds, blasted off on December 30 and soared to 2,000 feet—more than twenty times as high as any previous Goddard attempt.
The parachute failed to deploy completely, and the rocket crashed several hundred yards from the launch tower. Still, this was progress. “It seemed more like the operation of a vehicle than the flight of a rocket,” Goddard wrote. “The sustained and effortless qualities of the flight were the most striking.”
He continued his policy of strict secrecy. “Through the years, people would ask us where the Goddard tower was and we’d tell them stories,” a neighbor named May Marley told Milton Lehman, a Goddard biographer. “I told so many lies, I guess I’ll never get to Heaven. We’d send them south of Roswell, usually. If anybody heard a rocket shoot and asked about the noise, we’d say it was Indians up in the Capitan Mountains.”
In his early years at Roswell, Goddard developed a stabilizing system to guide the rocket’s flight. It consisted of a set of four gyroscopically controlled steering vanes. Any major deviation from the vertical would tilt one of the vanes into the wake of hot gas rushing from the nozzle and thus push the rocket back on course. Goddard described the system as “a veritable mechanical brain directing mechanical muscles.”
ON THE FIRST TEST FLIGHT OF THE CONTROL SYSTEM, on April 19, 1932, the rocket rose a short distance and then plummeted to the ground. It was a pretty discouraging sight, but Goddard found cause for hope in the wreckage: “I rushed to the rocket and felt the four vanes. The one that should have been forced into the blast was warm—the others cold! Thus I knew that our idea was sound, and concluded that we merely needed larger vanes.”
The next day he wrote a letter to H. G. Wells, who had been a source of inspiration for Goddard since childhood. He reread Wells’s War of the Worlds nearly every Christmas season. “What I find most inspiring is your optimism,” he told Wells. “It is the best antidote I know for the feeling of depression that comes at times when one contemplates the remarkable capacity for bungling of both man and nature.” That same day he wrote in similar vein to Rudyard Kipling: “I have enjoyed your writings for many years … The sordid side of life and the idealistic side, the rough-andtumble fight, and the most pathetically delicate things are all written equally convincingly.”
Of his own work, Goddard wrote to Wells: “How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem, I do not know; I hope, as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for ‘aiming at the stars,’ both figuratively and literally, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.”
Two months later the deepening Depression cut off Goddard’s Guggenheim funding and forced him to return to Worcester. He was reduced to begging the Smithsonian for a $250 grant. With this and small amounts from Clark, he managed to scrape by for two years, continuing his research in the laboratory since he could not make any flight tests. Goddard made the bureaucratic circuit of military and philanthropic donors and elicited effusive praise but no money. Dejected, he wrote in his diary in April 1933: “The rocket is very human. It can raise itself to the very loftiest positions solely by the ejection of enormous quantities of hot air.”
Back at Roswell in early 1935, with his funding restored, Goddard launched rockets that broke the sound barrier and reached altitudes of more than a mile and a half. Later that year he invited Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim (Daniel’s son) to New Mexico to witness a test flight. A minor technical problem aborted one launch attempt; then rain delayed further tries for two days. When Goddard was at last able to try another launch, the combustion chamber burned through and the rocket merely smoldered in its tower.
Lindbergh, who later said that Goddard “was as mortified as a parent whose child misbehaves in front of company,” sent Goddard a consoling letter, telling him that despite the failed launches, he and Guggenheim “came back with the feeling that the project is being managed with unusual efficiency and intelligence and that success was a matter of time rather than possibility.” But how much time did Goddard have? A decade earlier he had estimated that a few years and a few thousand dollars would allow him to send a rocket hundreds of miles into space. He was still nowhere near that goal.
In his later years at Roswell, Goddard directed much of his efforts toward reducing the weight of his rockets. His first rockets launched from Eden Valley had used a tank of compressed nitrogen to force propellant and lox into the chamber, but this arrangement added a lot of weight to the rocket. To get rid of the nitrogen tanks, Goddard developed small, lightweight centrifugal pumps to force fuel into the chamber. The pumps were driven by turbines, which were started up before launch by a stream of nitrogen from an external tank. After ignition the tank was disconnected, and diverted exhaust gases kept the turbines in motion.
Building the pumps from scratch took years, during which flight testing progressed with agonizing slowness. Even when the pumps worked perfectly, a hundred of other things might go wrong: a stuck lever, a broken connection, a burned-out combustion chamber. In June 1938 a tornado destroyed the launch tower and the latest version of “Nell” (as all Goddard’s rockets were called by this point). Goddard and his men toiled all day in the desert heat, salvaging whatever they could.
“I shall not forget how Bob looked,” Esther wrote. “Fatigue showed in every line of him especially his shoulders, bent forward, as they always are, to protect the weakness of his lungs. A man who ‘should be in bed in Switzerland’ [as a doctor had once told him] coming in at 7:30 at night after a day that began at 3 in the morning.… And as he came in last night, almost staggering, the undefeatable was still in his eyes, and made me ashamed.”
That fall a monstrous hurricane lashed the Northeastern states, including Worcester, where it ripped Goddard’s cherry tree out of the ground. “Cherry tree down,” he wrote in his diary. “Have to carry on alone.”
But Goddard was not alone in the rocket business, whether he liked it or not. He obstinately refused pleas to accept collaborators or farm out some of the work, but other researchers were more than willing to pool their talent and resources. In the early 1930s Germany’s Society for Space Ship Travel launched several small liquid-fueled rockets. An almost complete lack of funding and the German government’s opposition to civilian rocket research discouraged further experimentation until the German military’s own program went into full swing in 1936.
“Until 1936, Goddard was ahead of us all,” wrote Wernher von Braun, who served as technical director of German rocket development at Peenemunde, on the Baltic island of Usedom. The Nazi regime poured several billion dollars into rocket research, which paid off with the spectacular and fearsome V-2 rocket. Fueled by grain alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V-2 weighed twelve tons including fuel and towered nearly 50 feet high. The rocket had a range of 190 miles and reached a maximum altitude of 68 miles—more than 30 times the altitude of Goddard’s most successful rocket. Several thousand V-2 rockets rained destruction on England in the waning months of the war.
While the German military buildup jump-started rocketry in that country, in the United States war diverted Goddard from his experiments. He could not persuade the government to fund research into long-range rockets, so he left Roswell in 1942 to serve as director of jet propulsion research with the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Annapolis, Maryland. With his team from Roswell he developed and flight-tested a jet-assisted takeoff system. The group also developed a variable-thrust rocket motor intended for use in manned rocket planes. Meanwhile the Army resurrected Goddard’s lightweight rocket launcher from World War I. U.S. troops used the weapon, modified and dubbed the bazooka, to take out German tanks.
IN EARLY 1945 GODDARD HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO STUDY a captured V-2. In a letter to Harry Guggenheim he outlined the similarities between the V-2 and his last version of Nell: Both used lox as the oxidizer, incorporated turbine-driven centrifugal pumps, and employed a gyroscopic stabilizer that steered blast vanes to correct the rocket’s flight. Unlike Goddard’s rockets, the V-2 had a double-walled combustion chamber: fuel flowed between the two walls before entering the chamber itself. This served the twin functions of cooling the chamber and warming the fuel before combustion. Goddard had conceived this method of “regenerative cooling” decades earlier but had never used it in any of his rockets, preferring the troublesome but mechanically simpler curtain cooling method.
“I don’t think he ever got over the V-2,” one of Goddard’s associates said. “He felt the Germans had copied his work and that he could have produced a bigger, better and less expensive rocket, if only the United States had accepted the long-range rocket.”
The V-2 vindicated Goddard’s designs, but it also served as a stark repudiation of his secretiveness, his refusal to collaborate, and his relentless focus on technical details at the expense of seeking record-breaking altitudes. Through their collective efforts, the German rocket scientists went far beyond what Goddard could accomplish on his own.
“It seems to me that he has a tendency to underemphasize the importance of actual rocket flights,” Lindbergh wrote to Harry Guggenheim. “… No one but a specialist is in a position to judge the value of highly specialized work, unless it can be demonstrated by its effect on more easily understood accomplishments.”
J. D. Hunley, a NASA historian, believes there is more to it than that: “Simply put, besides remaining a loner, he failed to follow the step-by-step procedures called for by standard engineering practice.” Instead of adjusting one variable at a time, Hunley writes, “he usually changed several components on a given rocket in between separate tests.” For example, when a 1931 rocket plummeted and exploded in midair after ascending only 200 feet, Goddard decreased gasoline flow into the combustion chamber, altered the chamber itself, modified the parachute-releasing mechanism, modified the way the cooling curtain of liquid oxygen was applied to the inner surface of the chamber, changed the dimensions of the gasoline tank, and reduced the overall length of the rocket by more than two feet.
GODDARD’S HEALTH DECLINED DURING THE war, perhaps in part because of the damp Chesapeake climate. His voice grew weak and hoarse; he sometimes had to communicate with his subordinates by tapping a pencil stub against his desk in Morse code. He grew bored with his military work, which included developing components for small, short-range rockets, and became preoccupied with his patents and notes, intent on setting the record straight about his achievements in rocketry. He died of throat cancer on August 10, 1945, the day after the Allies dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. He was sixty-two years old.
Shortly after the war von Braun, Hermann Oberth, and more than a hundred other German rocket scientists emigrated to the United States to develop missiles for the Army. In 1951 Esther Goddard and the Guggenheim Foundation sued the government for infringing on Goddard’s patents. Nine years later the newly established NASA announced a $1 million settlement for rights to more than two hundred Goddard patents. The previous year Congress posthumously awarded Goddard the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 1961 NASA dedicated the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A Goddard postage stamp was issued in 1964. The site of Goddard’s major work, Roswell, is now firmly associated with space travel—not because of Goddard but because UFO devotees believe that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed there in 1947.
The posthumous recognition of Goddard’s work may have had as much to do with salvaging national pride—of putting an American in the pantheon with Oberth, Tsiolkovsky, and von Braun—as with his contributions to the development of rockets and space travel. Goddard accomplished many firsts, and his work served as an important source of inspiration for early rocket designers. But because of his secretiveness, others often had to blaze their own trails to get where Goddard had already been.
