Robert Goddard (scientist)

Robert Hutchings Goddard (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945) was one of the pioneers of modern rocketry. Though his work in the field was revolutionary, he was often ridiculed for his theories, which were ahead of their time. He received little recognition during his own lifetime, but would eventually come to be called the "father of modern rocketry" for his life's work.

Contemporary criticism of Goddard

Goddard was suspicious of others and often worked alone, which limited the ripple effect from his work. His unsociability was a result of the harsh criticism that he received from the media and from other scientists, who doubted the viability of rocket travel in space. After one of his experiments in 1929, a local Worcester newspaper carried the headline "Moon rocket misses target by 238,799 1/2 miles."

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On January 12, 1920 a front-page story in The New York Times, "Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon," reported a Smithsonian press release about a "multiple charge high efficiency rocket." The chief application seen was "the possibility of sending recording apparatus to moderate and extreme altitudes within the earth's atmosphere," the advantage over balloon-carried instruments being ease of recovery since "the new rocket apparatus would go straight up and come straight down." But it also mentioned a proposal "to to the dark part of the new moon a sufficiently amount of the most brilliant flash powder which, in being ignited on impact, would be plainly visible in a powerful telescope. This would be the only way of proving that the rocket had really left the attraction of the earth as the apparatus would never come back."

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January 12 - 1920 - The New York Times

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The next day, an unsigned Times editorial delighted in heaping scorn on the proposal. The editorial writer attacked the instrumentation application by questioning whether "the instruments would return to the point of departure... for parachutes drift just as balloons do. And the rocket, or what was left of it after the last explosion, would need to be aimed with amazing skill, and in a dead calm, to fall on the spot whence it started. But that is a slight inconvenience... though it might be serious enough from the of the always innocent bystander... a few thousand yards from the firing line."

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The weight of scorn was, however, reserved for the lunar proposal: "after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey it will neither be accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only DR. EINSTEIN and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that." It expressed disbelief that Professor Goddard actually "does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react" and even talked of "such things as intentional mistakes or oversights." Goddard, the Times insisted, apparently suggesting bad faith, "only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

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As noted below, the Times published a "correction" the day after the launch of Apollo 11.

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