Where the Space Age Began: Goddard's Auburn Field
Near Worcester, Massachusetts
On March sixteenth, nineteen twenty-six, a physics professor named Robert Goddard stood in a snow-covered cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts, and launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. It flew for two and a half seconds, reached an altitude of about forty-one feet, and landed one hundred eighty-four feet away. The press largely ignored it.
Goddard had been working on rocket theory since his days at Worcester's Clark University, and over the following fifteen years he and his small team launched thirty-four rockets, eventually achieving speeds of five hundred fifty miles per hour. His two hundred fourteen patents formed the blueprint for modern rocketry. NASA named its Goddard Space Flight Center after him in nineteen fifty-nine, fourteen years after his death. The Auburn launch site is now a National Historic Landmark.
