Robert Goddard
American Scientist and Inventor
1882-1945
Born in 1882 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Robert Goddard was a "rocket man" before he was a man at all. As a boy he seemed to know that if he could figure out how to harness all of the chemical energy in the powders that fueled firecrackers and dynamite he could make things fly.
When he was a college student in Worcester, Goddard tried to figure out just how to do it. Fooling around with the arithmetic of propulsion, he figured out how much the fuels would weigh. Fooling around with airtight chambers, he found that a rocket could really fly in a vacuum. Fooling around with basic chemistry, he learned, most importantly, that if he hoped to launch a missile very far, he could never do it with the poor black powder that had long been the stuff of rocketry. Instead, he would need something with real oomph--a liquid like kerosene or liquid hydrogen, mixed with liquid oxygen to allow combustion to take place in the airless environment of space. Fill a missile with that kind of fuel, and you could retire black powder for good.
For nearly 20 years, Goddard's theories were just theories. When he'd build a rocket and carry it out to a field, it never flew anywhere at all. Finally, all that changed. On March 16, 1926, Goddard finished building a spindly, 10-ft. rocket he called Nell, loaded it into an open car and trundled it out to his aunt Effie's nearby farm. He set up the missile in a field, then summoned an assistant, who lit its fuse with a blowtorch attached to a long stick. For an instant the rocket did nothing at all, then suddenly it leaped from the ground and screamed into the sky at 60 m.p.h! Climbing to an altitude of 41 ft., it arced over, plummeted earthward and slammed into a frozen cabbage patch 184 ft. away. The entire flight lasted just 2 1/2 sec.--but that was 2 1/2 sec. Longer than any liquid-fueled rocket had ever managed to fly before.
Goddard was thrilled with his triumph but resolved not to talk about it. If people thought he was crazy when he was just designing rockets, who knew what they'd say when the things actually started to fly?
In 1930, Goddard and his wife Esther headed west to Roswell, N.Mex., where the land was vast and the launch weather good, and where the locals, they were told, minded their business. Over the next nine years, his Nells grew from 12 ft. to 16 ft. to 18 ft., and their altitude climbed from 2,000 ft. to 7,500 ft. to 9,000 ft! He also built a rocket that exceeded the speed of sound!
He died in 1945, but his work continued and eventually led to the development of the Redstone rocket that put the first American into space. He is considered the "Father of Modern Rocketry"
pages from Robert Goddard's journal
http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/goddard.html