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American physicist

Robert H. Goddard was foremost among the first generation of rocket and space pioneers. Goddard not only contributed to space flight theory, but also engaged over most of his adult life in the actual development of rockets. As a result, he is credited with launching the world's first liquid-propellant rocket. He developed and patented a large number of innovations in rocket technology that were later used in the much larger rockets and missiles employed by the Germans during World War II and, thereafter, by the United States' and Soviet Union's missile and space programs, among others. Paradoxically, Goddard's influence upon modern rocketry was not as great as it would have been had he been less a solitary inventor and more inclined to publish his findings in scientific journals and elsewhere.

Robert Hutchings Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Nahum Danford Goddard, himself something of an inventor, and Fannie Louise Hoyt Goddard, the daughter of a machine knife manufacturer for whom her husband worked at the time of their marriage. Of modest means but old New England stock, Goddard's parents had a second son who died in infancy. Goddard himself was prone to illness and fell behind in school, compensating with self-education. Encouraged by his father in his early inclinations towards experimentation and invention, Goddard also heeded his father's advice to mind his own business and work for himself rather than someone else. Science fiction proved another early influence upon him, one that apparently led to a transforming experience he had in a cherry tree on October 19, 1899, when he imagined a device that might ascend to Mars. As he stated in an autobiographical memoir, the experience suddenly made life seem purposeful to him. Throughout the rest of his life, he

recorded the date in his diary as "anniversary day," and he revisited the tree on that date whenever he was in Worcester.

Goddard received his early education in the Boston area, where his father had been working, and had not done well in algebra during his first year in high school. When the family moved back to Worcester in 1898, after his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis, his experience in the cherry tree compelled him to excel in math and physics at South High School. Because of his own illnesses, Goddard did not graduate from South High until 1904, when he was 21. He went on to earn a bachelor's degree in general science, with a concentration in physics, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1908, and a master's degree from Clark University in 1910. By 1909, Goddard had already begun teaching physics at Worcester Polytechnic and shortly after receiving his doctorate from Clark in 1911, he became an honorary fellow in physics there. Working as a research instructor in physics at Princeton University, Goddard fell dangerously ill in 1913 and, like his mother, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Initially given only two weeks to live, he recovered sufficiently the following year to become a physics instructor at Clark, where he was promoted to assistant professor in 1915. Goddard would remain at Clark throughout much of his academic career, allowing for leaves of absence to pursue rocket research. Goddard eventually became head of Clark's physics department and director of the physical laboratories, obtaining the rank of full professor in 1934. In 1924, Goddard married Esther Christine Kisk, the secretary to the president of Clark. Although the couple had no children, they became devoted to one another and to Goddard's rocket research, in which Esther became very much a partner.

Goddard apparently did not begin serious work on rocket development until early 1909, while a graduate student at Clark. He had, by 1914, obtained a patent for a two-stage powder rocket, followed by patents for a cartridge-loading rocket and a rocket that burned a mixture of gasoline and liquid nitrous oxide. While he was aware of the greater efficiencies of liquid propellants, Goddard found them hard to obtain, preferring instead, smokeless powder, which offered fewer experimental difficulties. Using a steel combustion chamber and a sleeker exhaust nozzle, named for Swedish engineer Carl de Laval, Goddard was able to achieve higher rates of energy efficiency and exhaust velocities than previous rockets had exhibited. He also developed a device that allowed him to fire a rocket in a vacuum, showing that it could operate in the upper atmosphere where air density was small and also demonstrating that it did not require a reaction against the air, as many knowledgeable people at the time supposed.

Until 1916, Goddard had conducted these experiments using the meager funds and facilities provided by Clark, as well as money from his own pocket. No longer able to support the research required to advance his theories, Goddard applied for funding to the Aero Club of America and the Smithsonian Institution. After several inquiries into his request, Goddard reported to the Smithsonian that he had developed a means of propelling meteorological recording devices to heights previously unattainable by sounding balloons, indicating that altitudes of 100–200 mi (161–322 km) could be reached within a year's time. By January 1917, The Smithsonian had awarded Goddard a grant for $5,000. This proved to be the first of many grants from the Smithsonian, Clark University, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Daniel Guggenheim, and especially the Guggenheim Foundation.

Before the Smithsonian funds could be put to use, America became embroiled in World War I. Supported by the U.S. Army, Goddard and a number of technicians developed both multiple-charge and single-charge recoilless rockets, the latter serving as a prototype for the bazooka which proved effective against tanks during World War II. While tests proved these weapons successful, the armistice intervened before they could be employed. Once World War I was over, Goddard's department head at Clark prodded him into publishing the results of his solid-propellant rocket researches in a paper entitled "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," which appeared in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. In it, Goddard not only explained the experiments he had conducted, but laid the foundations for much of the early theory of modern rocketry. While devoted primarily to the solid propellants he had used in his research, the paper did mention the greater efficiencies of propellants such as hydrogen and oxygen used in their liquid states. The paper briefly discussed the use of stages (propulsion units coupled together to fire in sequence) in order to reach extreme altitudes, and included numerous calculations of such matters as the reduced resistance a rocket would face as it climbed higher and entered less dense portions of the earth's atmosphere.

The reaction to this paper was shaped by a Smithsonian press release emphasizing a point Goddard had not intended as the focus of the work. It suggested the possibility of using a rocket to send a small quantity of flash powder to the dark side of the Moon, where, when ignited, it could be viewed from the earth through telescopes, thereby proving that extreme altitude had been reached. The press played up the idea of a moon rocket, and Goddard was embarrassed by the publicity. His inclination against publicizing his work until rockets were actually capable of reaching such altitudes was reinforced. Nevertheless, he persisted in his rocket development in his native Massachusetts for the next decade. Frustrated at the problems he encountered in using solid propellants, he switched to liquid propellants in 1921, though it was not until March 16, 1926—almost ten years after his initial proposal to the Smithsonian—that he launched the world's first liquid-propellant rocket from a hill in Auburn, Massachusetts. Since this was an important event in the history of rocketry, it is noteworthy that the hill, on his Aunt Effie's farm, had an Indian name meaning "a turning point or place." The small rocket only rose 41 ft (12.5 m)—far short of the altitudes he sought to reach—but it represented a significant beginning to the age of rocket flight, comparable, perhaps, to the Wright brothers' contributions to aviation.

From a number of standpoints, including its weather and its population density, Massachusetts was hardly an ideal location for launching noisy, fire-belching rockets. So, when Goddard received a generous $50,000 grant from philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim in mid–1930, he took a two-year leave of absence from Clark University and, with his wife and some technical assistants, rented a farmhouse near Roswell, New Mexico, where he proceeded with his rocket development. Loss of funding after 1932 interrupted his research there, but he returned to Roswell in 1934 to resume his testing. In the process, he invented and patented a large number of innovations, including a gyroscopically-controlled guidance system, and a method for cooling the combustion chamber that used a film of propellant streaming along the sides of the chamber. Parachutes were incorporated for recovery of the rocket and a number of instruments were devised for measuring the rocket's performance. Goddard also searched for ways to make a more lightweight, streamlined rocket casing. But he never succeeded in putting all of these components together to create a vehicle capable of reaching anything close to the 100–200 mi (161–322 km) of altitude he had originally expected to achieve. The greatest height one of his rockets reached was estimated at 8,000–9,000 ft (2,440–2,740 m) in March, 1937.

In 1941, he discontinued his attempt to reach extreme altitudes and began work for the armed forces on defenserelated rocket research as he had during World War I. In 1942, he moved his crew of assistants to the Naval Engineering Experimental Station in Annapolis, Maryland, where they worked on developing jet-assisted take-off devices for aircraft, pumps, and a variable-thrust rocket motor that became the basis for the one later used on the Bell X–2 rocket plane, the first aircraft in America to use a throttleable engine. This, like the bazooka, was a very important and tangible result of his research. His many patented inventions were also significant. In June 1960, the Army, Air Force, Navy, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognized their importance when they granted Mrs. Esther C. Goddard and the Guggenheim Foundation a settlement of $1,000,000 for the right to use many of Goddard's patents.

Despite his technical achievements, however, Goddard's career remained somewhat flawed by his failure to reach the extreme altitudes he sought, and by his secretive nature and consequent failure to communicate most of the details of his research to other scientists and engineers. In 1936, he did publish another paper entitled "Liquid-propellant Rocket Development." Here, Goddard devoted much more attention to liquid propulsion than he had in 1919, and while he did include pictures of some of his rockets and discussed some of their features, the brevity of his treatment (some seventeen pages in his published papers) made the work of limited utility to other scientists and engineers engaged in rocket development. While some of them were inspired by Goddard's example, for the most part they had to develop their own counterparts to his innovations without the benefit of a detailed knowledge of his pioneering inventions.

Despite this failing, Goddard was a remarkable figure in the history of rocket development. Of the many streets, buildings, and awards named in his honor, perhaps the most significant is NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, dedicated on March 16, 1961—the 35th anniversary of the first flight of a liquid-propellant rocket. On that occasion, Mrs. Goddard accepted a Congressional Gold Medal presented posthumously to him. A little more than nine years later, Clark University named its new library after Goddard. Since 1958, the National Space Club in Washington, DC, has awarded a Goddard Memorial Trophy for achievement in missiles, rocketry, and space flight. Finally, it might be noted that in 1960, Goddard was the ninth recipient of the Langley Gold Medal, awarded only sparingly since 1910 by the Smithsonian Institution for excellence in aviation.

See also Aerodynamics; Satellite; Spacecraft, manned