In 1919 the Smithsonian published a sober sixty nine page monograph by a physics professor at Clark University called A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. It was mostly about the mathematics of multistage rockets and the efficiency of propellants, and it was rigorous enough that the Smithsonian had funded the work.
In a short final section, Robert Goddard noted that a sufficiently large rocket could in principle reach the Moon, and that you could prove it had arrived by loading it with flash powder and observing the flare through a telescope.
That paragraph was the only one anyone read.
The Editorial
On 13 January 1920 the New York Times ran an unsigned editorial about him. It is worth quoting because the error in it is so precise:
“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react, is a thing to marvel at. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
The argument is that a rocket cannot work in the vacuum of space because there is no air to push against.
This is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that is taught early. A rocket does not push against the air. It pushes against the mass it is throwing out of the back of itself. Momentum is conserved: expel gas one way at high speed and the vehicle goes the other way, and the surrounding medium is irrelevant except as something to get in the way. The third law of motion, stated in 1687, covers the case entirely. A rocket works better in vacuum than in atmosphere, because there is no drag.
The newspaper had accused a man of not knowing high school physics while itself getting high school physics backwards, and had done it in print, in the most widely read paper in the country.
What It Did to Him
Goddard was thirty seven, methodical, and extremely private. The public ridicule made him more so. He had already had the central idea as a teenager, on 19 October 1899, sitting in a cherry tree in his aunt’s yard in Worcester, and he marked that date privately every year for the rest of his life as Anniversary Day.
After 1920 he stopped publishing freely. He filed patents, more than two hundred of them eventually, and he kept his results to himself and to his funders. This had consequences that went beyond his feelings: the German rocket engineers, who were reading everything, ended up better informed about the state of American rocketry than most Americans were.
He did the work anyway. On 16 March 1926, in a field in Auburn, Massachusetts, in front of his wife Esther with a camera and two colleagues, he launched the first rocket in history powered by liquid fuel, gasoline and liquid oxygen. It rose 12.5 metres, flew for two and a half seconds, and landed 56 metres away in a cabbage patch.
Nothing about that flight is impressive as a flight. Everything about it is decisive as a demonstration, because solid rockets had existed for eight hundred years and could not be throttled, steered or shut down, and every vehicle that has ever left the atmosphere has used the liquid principle proved in that cabbage field.
The Police, and Then Lindbergh
A larger launch in July 1929 made enough noise to bring ambulances and police, and the Worcester paper reported it under a headline about a Moon rocket missing its target by 238,799 and a half miles. Massachusetts told him to stop.
The rescue came from Charles Lindbergh, who had actually read the Smithsonian report and understood it, and who persuaded the Guggenheim family to fund him properly. In 1930 Goddard moved to Roswell, New Mexico, where there was space and nobody to annoy, and spent most of the next fifteen years quietly inventing the things a rocket needs:
- Gyroscopic stabilisation, so the vehicle knows which way is up, with vanes in the exhaust to correct its attitude
- Gimballed thrust, steering by swivelling the engine itself, which is how every large launcher is steered today
- Turbopumps to force propellant into the chamber faster than tank pressure allows, the component that makes large engines possible at all
- Regenerative cooling, circulating cold fuel around the combustion chamber so the chamber does not melt
- Parachute recovery and film records of every test, which is why we know precisely what he achieved
His best flight reached about 2.7 kilometres in 1937. He never got near the Moon, never had a large budget, and never built a team of more than a handful of people.
The Correction
Goddard died on 10 August 1945, two weeks before the Japanese surrender, having spent the war on navy jet assisted takeoff units. Wernher von Braun, interrogated after the war, was asked about the V-2’s origins and said that Goddard’s publications had been studied closely and that they had learned a great deal from him.
On 17 July 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched and three days before the landing, the New York Times published this:
“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 Times regrets the error.”
Forty nine years, and the retraction cites Newton rather than Goddard, which is somehow exactly right. The physics had never been in question. Only the reputation had.
The Part Worth Taking Away
The comfortable version of this story is that the visionary was right and the critics were fools. The useful version is narrower.
The editorial was not wrong because it was unimaginative about the Moon. Plenty of sensible people were sceptical about the Moon in 1920, and the Moon was a throwaway paragraph in a technical report. It was wrong because it made a confident public claim about elementary mechanics without checking the elementary mechanics, and it aimed that claim at a named individual.
The cost was not only to Goddard. A man who might have collaborated openly spent twenty five years working alone behind patents, and the people who benefited most from his silence were building the same equations into weapons in Peenemünde. The Saturn V that finally answered the editorial used gimballed engines, turbopumps and regenerative cooling, all of which he had patented before 1940.
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