THE GODDARD LEGACY
(originally run: March 17, 2006)
Even though there were only a handful of witnesses,
history was made eighty years ago this week. At 2:30 in the afternoon of March
16, 1926, from a cold and frozen field near Auburn, Massachusetts, a small rocket,
barely over one foot long, lifted off from a spindly metal frame. It then rose
41 feet into the air, and after a total flight time of 2 1/2 seconds,
crashed in a cabbage field 184 feet away. This event was the first successful
launch of a liquid-fueled rocket, and those who witnessed the flight were
physicist Robert Goddard, who had designed and built it, his wife Esther, and
two assistants.
Rockets, the principle mechanism of which arises from
Newton's Third Law of motion, had been around for several centuries, primarily
for warfighting purposes. All of the early forms of rockets had utilized some
kind of solid propellant gunpowder, or something similar as their source of
fuel. While such propellants provided a strong initial ³push,² their explosive
nature made them difficult to control, and made long-distant rocket flights all
but impossible. Some of the early rocket scientists, among them Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky in Russia and Hermann Oberth in Germany, had suggested the
possibility of utilizing liquid-fueled rockets to overcome these difficulties,
but it was Goddard, their American contemporary, who first demonstrated that
this concept was feasible.
Goddard had become interested in spaceflight while still
a young child, and had an epiphany at the age of 16 when he climbed a cherry
tree and imagined ³how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even
the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale,
if sent up from the meadow at my feet.² He later became a professor of physics
at Clark University in Massachusetts, and although his research work extended
to other areas including the development of a device which later became known
as the bazooka, which he successfully launched from a music rack near the end
of World War I his primary interest remained with rockets.
In early 1920 Goddard published a paper for the
Smithsonian Institution entitled ³A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,²
wherein towards the end he speculated on the possibility of utilizing rockets
to make flights to the moon. Shortly thereafter an article about this paper
appeared in the New York Times, and the
following day an editorial in the Times viciously lampooned Goddard's ideas. The anonymous writer of that
editorial, arguing that a rocket could not possibly work in space because there
was no atmosphere to push against an argument that seriously misunderstands
the basic principles of rocketry lambasted Goddard as someone who lacked ³the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.²
Strongly incensed and stung by this unwarranted
criticism, from that point on Goddard refused to publicize his efforts, and his
history-making launch from Auburn received almost no publicity of any kind.
Neither did his subsequent successful launches from Massachusetts, which
featured higher and longer-lasting flights, and several new innovations.
Goddard's work did, however, come to the attention of
famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who persuaded philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim
to fund additional research. Armed with this funding, Goddard and his team
moved westward to the open desert near Roswell, New Mexico. From 1930 to 1942
Goddard conducted 56 rocket test flights from Roswell, with these eventually
reaching altitudes of 9000 feet and which included numerous technological
innovations, including stabilizing gyroscopes and deflector vanes to redirect
the rockets' exhaust.
Goddard tried unsuccessfully to interest the U.S. Army in
his rocket research. Ironically, the German military, and in particular the German
scientist Wernher von Braun, did take an interest in his work, and von Braun's
team successfully appropriated Goddard's research to develop the V-2 rockets
that were used by Germany during World War II. After the war von Braun and his
team were expatriated to the U.S., and continued their rocket research at White
Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico only a three hours' drive from the site of
Goddard's experiments at Roswell. The rest, as they say, is history.
Nowadays almost all the rockets that are used to place
objects above the Earth's atmosphere whether they be communications
satellites or spacecraft to the other planets or anything in between utilize
the liquid fuel propulsion techniques developed by Goddard. (One notable
exception involves the solid rocket boosters that are used to help launch the
Space Shuttle.) In a manner reminiscent of the development of the entire
aviation industry from the events that took place at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
in 1903, our entire rocketry industry can trace its origins to the events that
transpired in obscurity on a frozen field in Massachusetts eighty years ago.
Incidentally, on the day after the launch of the Apollo
11 lunar mission in 1969, the New
York Times retracted its criticism from
almost half a century earlier, remarking: ³Further 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.² Better late than never . . .
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