Goddard Launches First Liquid Rocket: Space Age Begins

Robert Goddard's rocket flew for 2.5 seconds, reached an altitude of 41 feet, and landed in a cabbage patch 184 feet from the launch site. The test on March 16, 1926, at his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, lasted barely longer than a sneeze, but it was the first successful flight of a liquid-fueled rocket in history and the founding moment of the Space Age. Goddard had been obsessed with spaceflight since reading H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as a teenager. By 1914, he had filed patents for a multistage rocket and a liquid-fuel propulsion system. His 1919 monograph, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, laid out the theoretical case for using rockets to reach space, including a proposal to send a flash powder charge to the moon to prove a rocket had arrived. The New York Times mocked him for not understanding that rockets could not work in a vacuum, a claim that demonstrated the newspaper's misunderstanding of basic physics, not Goddard's. The 1926 rocket used liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellants, fed to a combustion chamber at the top of the rocket rather than the bottom, a design Goddard later reversed. The rocket stood ten feet tall and weighed about six pounds empty. Goddard's assistant, Henry Sachs, ignited the motor with a blowtorch attached to a long pole while Goddard operated the fuel valves. Goddard's wife Esther filmed the launch with a handheld camera. Goddard launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941, eventually reaching altitudes of 2.6 kilometers and speeds of 885 kilometers per hour. He developed gyroscopic stabilization, steerable thrust vanes, and numerous innovations that German engineers later incorporated into the V-2 rocket. When Werner von Braun was asked about his intellectual debt to Goddard, he replied, "Don't you know about your own Goddard? He was ahead of us all." Goddard died of throat cancer in 1945, months before V-2 rockets demonstrated to the world what he had known for decades: that liquid fuel could carry a payload to the edge of space and beyond.