3 –
2 – 1 – Liftoff!
On
this date in 1926, Robert Goddard successfully launched the first
liquid-fuel-powered rocket.
Did
he get fame and support for his revolutionary invention? Yes!
But he didn't get a whole lot of support during his lifetime.
Goddard
won the Langley Gold Medal and the Congressional gold medal, and his
name was honored with a crater on the moon, a high school, and an
important NASA facility. Goddard has even been honored on a postage
stamp and on the show Star Trek: The Next Generation.
During
the time when he was pushing the boundaries of space and Earth's
atmosphere with 34 rockets, Goddard was publicized in newspapers but
also criticized and even ridiculed.
Even
though Goddard was able to secure a position at Clark University in
Massachusetts and a sponsorship from the Smithsonian Institution, and
even though his rocket launches were successful, eventually climbing
higher than a mile (2.6 km) and reaching speeds up to 550 mph (885
km/h)—even with all of those hints that the guy knew what he was
talking about, newspaper journalists and the general public scoffed
at his far-out ideas.
Goddard
thought we could send people in a rocket to the moon. Journalists
laughed at the idea; they said that, once the rocket traveled out of
the Earth's atmosphere, there would be nothing to “push against.”
One New York Times editorial sarcastically said that Goddard “only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
Of course we all know now that the Times
was wrong, and Goddard was right—and the day after the successful
Apollo 11 launch, in 1969, 49 years after this sneering editorial was
published, the Times printed “A Correction,” saying that “TheTimes regrets the error.”
Goddard
shied away from publicity, since his work had been sensationalized
and then mocked, but in private letters he talked about the
possibility of sending fly-by probes to visit the Moon and planets,
sending messages to possible aliens on inscribed metal plates, the use of
solar energy in space, ion propulsion, and an ablative heat shield for landing a spacecraft.
Every
one of these ideas has now been realized.
Here
are two wise quotes from Goddard:
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace."
"It
is not a simple matter to differentiate unsuccessful from successful
experiments. . . .[Most] work that is finally successful is the
result of a series of unsuccessful tests in which difficulties are
gradually eliminated."
Also
on this date:
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