Robert Hutchings Goddard (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945)[1] was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, which was successfully launched on March 16, 1926.

Years after his death, at the dawn of the Space Age, Goddard came to be recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth.

Inspired by these articles, the teenage Goddard watched swallows and chimney swifts from the porch of his home, noting how subtly the birds moved their wings to control their flight.

In his speech, entitled "On Taking Things for Granted", Goddard included a section that would become emblematic of his life: [J]ust as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp.

Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

[16]: 42  At WPI, Goddard joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and began a long courtship with high school classmate Miriam Olmstead, an honor student who had graduated with him as salutatorian.

[16]: 75  Connecting a combustion chamber full of gunpowder to various converging-diverging expansion (de Laval) nozzles, Goddard was able in static tests to achieve engine efficiencies of more than 63% and exhaust velocities of over 7,000 feet (2,134 meters) per second.

[38][39] Two years later, at the insistence of Arthur G. Webster, the world-renowned head of Clark's physics department, Goddard arranged for the Smithsonian to publish the paper, A Method..., which documented his work.

[16]: 102 While at Clark University, Goddard did research into solar power using a parabolic dish to concentrate the Sun's rays on a machined piece of quartz, that was sprayed with mercury, which then heated water and drove an electric generator.

Goddard, during his tenure at Clark University, and working at Mount Wilson Observatory for security reasons, designed the tube-fired rocket for military use during World War I.

He and his co-worker Clarence N. Hickman successfully demonstrated his rocket to the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on November 6, 1918, using two music stands for a launch platform.

[47] He determined, using an approximate method to solve his differential equation of motion for vertical flight, that a rocket with an effective exhaust velocity (see specific impulse) of 7000 feet per second and an initial weight of 602 pounds would be able to send a one-pound payload to an infinite height.

In a letter to the Smithsonian, dated March 1920, he discussed: photographing the Moon and planets from rocket-powered fly-by probes, sending messages to distant civilizations on inscribed metal plates, the use of solar energy in space, and the idea of high-velocity ion propulsion.

But it also mentioned a proposal "to [send] to the dark part of the new moon a sufficiently large amount of the most brilliant flash powder which, in being ignited on impact, would be plainly visible in a powerful telescope.

The article, which bore the title "A Severe Strain on Credulity",[53] began with apparent approval, but soon went on to cast serious doubt: As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even highest, part of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising device.

[56] A week after the New York Times editorial, Goddard released a signed statement to the Associated Press, attempting to restore reason to what had become a sensational story: Too much attention has been concentrated on the proposed flash pow[d]er experiment, and too little on the exploration of the atmosphere.

The three-paragraph statement summarized its 1920 editorial and concluded: Further 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.

In 1930 Lindbergh made several proposals to industry and private investors for funding, which proved all but impossible to find following the recent U.S. stock market crash in October 1929.

Buzz believed that if Goddard had received military support as Wernher von Braun's team had enjoyed in Germany, American rocket technology would have developed much more rapidly in World War II.

Just before World War II, the head of the aeronautics department at MIT, at a meeting held by the Army Air Corps to discuss project funding, said that the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) "can take the Buck Rogers Job [rocket research].

[71] With new financial backing, Goddard eventually relocated to the Eden Valley Test Site in Roswell, New Mexico, in summer of 1930,[60]: 46  where he worked with his team of technicians in near-isolation and relative secrecy for years.

He then used a curtain cooling method that involved spraying excess gasoline, which evaporated around the inside wall of the combustion chamber, but this scheme did not work well, and the larger rockets failed.

[23]: 1208–16, 1334, 1443 Shortly after World War II, Doolittle spoke concerning Goddard to an American Rocket Society (ARS) conference at which a large number interested in rocketry attended.

He had built the necessary turbopumps and was on the verge of building larger, lighter, more reliable rockets to reach extreme altitudes carrying scientific instruments when World War II intervened and changed the path of American history.

An accredited military attaché to the US, Friedrich von Boetticher, sent a four-page report to the Abwehr in 1936, and the spy Gustav Guellich sent a mixture of facts and made-up information, claiming to have visited Roswell and witnessed a launch.

[16]: 350 In August 1943, President Atwood at Clark wrote to Goddard that the university was losing the acting head of the physics department, was taking on "emergency work" for the army, and he was to "report for duty or declare the position vacant."

General Walter Dornberger, head of the V-2 project, used the idea that they were in a race with the U.S. and that Goddard had "disappeared" (to work with the Navy) as a way to persuade Hitler to raise the priority of the V-2.

"[90]: 90  However, at an earlier point, von Kármán said that Malina was "highly enthusiastic" after his visit and that Caltech made changes to their liquid-propellant rocket, based on Goddard's work and patents.

[20]Goddard spoke to professional groups, published articles and papers and patented his ideas; but while he discussed basic principles, he was unwilling to reveal the details of his designs until he had flown rockets to high altitudes and thus proven his theory.

Frank Malina went to Annapolis in February and consulted with Goddard and Stiff, and they arrived at a solution to the problem (hypergolic propellant: nitric acid and aniline), which resulted in the successful launch of the high-altitude research rocket in October 1945.