Everyone knows how Robert Goddard built and flew the
first-ever liquid fuel rocket on March 16, 1926. And they are absolutely right.
Everyone also knows how this paved the road to space by allowing the
construction of rockets powerful enough to leave the earth. Well, maybe
not so much.
Before 1926, Goddard was a gung-ho proponent of
space travel—and especially space travel by means of rocket propulsion. After
all, he’d been working on developing high-altitude rockets—under a
Smithsonian Grant, yet—since 1916 and had already received patents for a
liquid fuel rocket and a step-rocket in 1914.
Nor was Goddard particularly shy about
promoting his ideas. In a 1920 article for Popular Science he described
his scheme for hitting the moon with a rocket carrying a charge of flash
powder (see the illustration). Goddard had calculated that although a visit to the moon via a manned
rocket was still out of the question at the time he was writing, it would
nevertheless be possible to “reach out a long arm and tickle the moon” by
sending a charge of flash powder, the explosion of which could be observed from
the earth. Through his experiments, Goddard had concluded that a minimum charge
of 14 pounds was needed to make a visible flash visible. The magazine’s editors
commented that “Professor Goddard’s improvement at a single step transfers the
enterprise of hurling the missile to the moon from the class of impractical
dreams to the domain of comparatively simple tasks.”
The press went nuts with the Goddard
story. Newspapers and magazines ate it up. Goddard found himself labeled the
“Moon Rocket Man” in headlines around the world.
And that is where things started to go
wrong.
Although the Popular Science article inspired at least eighteen people to write
to Goddard to volunteer for the first flight to the moon, others looked on
Goddard’s ideas with a more jaundiced eye. The London Graphic, for instance,immediately published
a critique of Goddard’s plans for high-altitude and moon-rockets. Some of the
objections included the impossibility of safely returning instruments or
passengers from such great heights, what the value might be of such an
experiment, how the rocket could be protected from atmospheric friction since,
” . . . bodies when they speed through the air are subject to friction against
the air which is sufficient to generate tremendous heat,” with the result that “the
rocket will generate a red heat foremost of the first hundred miles.” At a
speed of 6.4 mps, the Graphic
believed, the rocket would “vanish in an incandescent wisp of flame and smoke.”
Another objection to the moon rocket was that the moon and the earth are moving
in different directions and at high speeds, and that there are “incalculable
vagaries of air currents” above 20 miles that would make steering the rocket
impossible.
Even the New York Times chimed in, chastising Goddard for believing that
rockets would work in space where they had no air to “push against.” The article
finished by saying that Goddard “only
seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
Goddard replied to these and other
objections in an article for Scientific American, but to very little avail. International
celebrity on the one hand and ignorant criticism on the other was too much for
a shy professor of physics at a small New England college. He withdrew from the
world like a frightened turtle. He refused to not only talk about his work, he
refused to publish anything about it, either. He began working in strict
secrecy, as far from civilization as he could get, allowing little if any news
of his work to be available to other researchers. And as he entered the 1930s
and 40s, Goddard grew ever more secretive and paranoid, eventually moving his work to a remote location in the desert near Roswell, NM (make of that what you will). Serious rocketeers both in the US and Europe were left flummoxed. They
knew Goddard was accomplishing great things…they just didn’t know how
he was doing it. They were left to reinvent from scratch everything Goddard had
done.
Thus the
construction and launch of Europe’s first liquid fuel rocket (and the first
anywhere since Goddard’s) was delayed until 1931. Built by German engineer
Johannes Winkler the two-foot rocket achieved an altitude of nearly 300 feet.
Winkler was a member of one the three
highly influential rocket societies that had been organized during the 1920s
and 30s. The Verein für Raumschiffarht (or VfR, the German Society for
Spaceship Travel), the American Interplanetary Society (later the American
Rocket Society) and the British Interplanetary Society (the only one of the
three to exist in more or less its original form today). The first two of these
performed many of the earliest serious and controlled liquid fuel rocket
experiments. Unlike Goddard, however, these societies were entirely open and
freely shared the results of their experiments.
The VfR was eventually subsumed by the
German military in the decade preceding World War II. Many of its members were
recruited into developing the V2 and other giant rockets at Peenemunde. After
the war, the V2 became the model for both US and Soviet rocket development,
with most early rockets, such as the US Viking and Vanguard and the Soviet R-1,
being derivatives of the German missile. It wasn’t until well into the late 50s
and 60s that entirely new designs were evolved. Even these benefitted, however,
from the earlier German research…research that in turn had been based on the
work of amateur experimenters who had been trying to duplicate Goddard’s
achievements.
The conclusion is that much of the
development of modern rocketry, at least up through the 1950s, can be traced
directly to the experiments of the VfR and ARS—and only tangentially to
Robert Goddard. Claims that Wernher von Braun and the Peenemunde team merely
copied Goddard’s work in developing the V2 have no basis in fact. There is no
evidence of any of the European experimenters having had enough access to
Goddard’s research to enable them to directly duplicate it. All they had to
work from was Goddard’s inspiration. (Having to reinvent things from scratch
didn’t always work out so well for everyone. After Goddard’s death, his widow
sued the US Government for infringing on his patents. The case was eventually
settled for $1 million.)
