Where Rocketry Was Born

A few miles from where you are, tucked into the ninth fairway of a golf course in Auburn, a granite marker stands on what was, on March sixteenth, nineteen twenty-six, the most consequential patch of farmland on earth.

Robert Goddard had been working in secret for years. A Clark University physics professor from Worcester, Goddard had been theorizing about liquid-fueled rockets since the early nineteen hundreds, when most scientists dismissed the idea as fantasy. The New York Times editorial board famously mocked him in nineteen twenty as someone who lacked the basic understanding of physics that every high school student possessed. They were spectacularly wrong.

On that March morning, Goddard set up a framework of thin pipes on the Asa Ward farm in Auburn. Inside was a rocket he later nicknamed Nell, powered by liquid oxygen and gasoline. Liquid fuels were his critical insight: they burn hotter and can be throttled in ways solid fuels cannot, making them the only practical basis for spacecraft propulsion.

That afternoon, Goddard ignited the engine. Nell rose slowly, climbed forty-one feet into the winter air, and flew for two and a half seconds before falling to earth a hundred and eighty-four feet away.

It sounds modest. But this was the Wright Brothers moment for space. Goddard had proven that liquid-fueled rockets could leave the ground. Everything that followed, the V-two rockets, the Apollo Saturn Five, the Space Shuttle, every satellite above you right now, descended from the physics he demonstrated in this Auburn field.

The farm later became a golf course. The National Park Service declared the site a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-six. The marker sits beside the fairway, easy to miss, which seems right for a discovery that most of Goddard's contemporaries could not see coming either.