Robert Goddard: The Rocket Man from Worcester

On March sixteenth, nineteen twenty-six, in a snow-covered farm field in Auburn, just east of Worcester, a physics professor named Robert Hutchings Goddard ignited a liquid-fueled rocket of his own design and watched it fly. It rose forty-one feet in two and a half seconds, traveling one hundred eighty-four feet before landing in a frozen cabbage patch. It was the first successful flight of a liquid-propellant rocket in history.

Goddard was born in Worcester on October fifth, eighteen eighty-two. He was a sickly child who spent long stretches away from school, which gave him time to read voraciously. In eighteen ninety-eight, at sixteen, he read H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds and began filling notebooks with ideas about getting off the planet. He later wrote that on a particular October afternoon, climbing a cherry tree, he looked up at the sky and imagined what it would be like to ascend to Mars.

He studied physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, then took his doctorate at Clark University, where around nineteen fourteen he began building and test firing gunpowder rockets. He joined the Clark physics faculty and spent the next two decades quietly, methodically working out the mathematics and engineering of liquid-propellant rocketry. The press mocked him. The New York Times editorial board published a piece declaring that space travel was impossible because rockets could not work in a vacuum. They were wrong.

Goddard went on to conduct over two hundred test flights in New Mexico, hold two hundred fourteen patents, and lay much of the theoretical and engineering foundation for modern rocketry. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland is named for him.

When American astronauts reached the moon in nineteen sixty-nine, the New York Times published a correction to its nineteen twenty editorial. The Times acknowledged that it had been mistaken.