The man who proved rockets could reach space was mocked in his time

In 1904, a young man delivered the valedictory address at his Massachusetts high school, on the precipice of launching the pioneering scientific work that would one day make spaceflight possible. Teenager Robert Goddard stood on the podium that day and said something prescient: “It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” Nothing could be taken for granted, he told listeners.

Today, Goddard’s words seem prophetic—after all, the pioneering titan of space exploration died before humans reached space. Yet nearly every aspect of modern rocketry reveals his influence, from the design of multistage rockets to the type of fuel used to send massive payloads into space. Goddard’s scientific research laid the foundation for the field, earning him the valediction of the “father of modern rocketry.” Here’s why it took decades for his genius to be fully recognized. 

Who was Robert Goddard? 

Born in 1882 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Robert Hutchings Goddard was the son of a prolific inventor with patents on a machine knife for skinning rabbits and a tool for welding. Fascinated by emerging technologies like electricity and encouraged by his father, the young Goddard was an adventurous experimenter with big dreams. 

By age 17, he was a fan of science fiction stories by authors like H.G. Wells, and while climbing a cherry tree to prune its branches in 1899, the teenager had a life-changing daydream inspired by Wells’s work. As he sat in the tree, he recalled later in his diary, Goddard imagined a spacecraft capable of flying to Mars spiraling away into the sky. His daydream was so compelling that he later cited it as a primary inspiration for his work, even celebrating its anniversary annually. 

While earning physics degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University, Goddard searched for ways to make this inspiration reality. The first airplane flight had occurred just a few years earlier in 1903, and Goddard came up with a new way to stabilize these shaky early planes in 1907. He proposed that pilots use gyroscopes—rotating devices that can maintain their physical orientation regardless of movement at its base—to maintain balance and better steer planes. The scientist also demonstrated the basic science behind the bazooka in 1917, days before an armistice ended the First World War. 

Goddard’s real interest was spaceflight, however, and he became increasingly convinced that rockets were the best way to launch a spacecraft. Tubelike rockets propelled by solid fuels such as gunpowder had existed for centuries. But Goddard, now a professor at Clark University, calculated that such fuels could never launch a payload out of Earth’s atmosphere. He theorized in 1908 that only liquid fuels could create the massive amount of thrust needed to get a rocket into space, then spent years both laying out the physics of rocketry and experimenting on real-world ways to put his theories into action.

The first liquid-fueled rocket

Self-funded and secretive about his work, Goddard gained fame in 1919 when he proved that liquid rocket propulsion would also work in the vacuum of space through theoretical mathematical calculations and static vacuum chamber tests. Multistage rockets propelled by liquid fuels might one day allow a rocket to reach a high enough velocity to escape the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere, he wrote. 

The findings were revolutionary—and controversial. Media coverage focused on the theoretical future applications of the work, mocking Goddard’s proposal that a rocket might one day reach the moon as “a severe strain on credulity” and jokily speculating that giant rockets could be the Atlantic liners of the future. 

But Goddard was serious—and he was closer to realizing liquid rocket propulsion than he let on. The physicist continued his testing in secret, and on March 16, 1926, he succeeded in launching a rocket using a combination of gasoline and liquid oxygen from a test site on his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. Nicknamed “Nell,” the rocket traveled 41 feet upward during a 2.5-second flight. 

Stung by the media’s treatment of his past work, Goddard kept his success a secret. He continued his experiments, refining his rocket and replacing its fins with removable vanes controlled by a gyroscope that allowed it to be steered. 

Advances in rocket technology

Goddard was secretive about his work, but it became increasingly hard to hide his increasingly advanced rocket experiments. As word of his work spread, he gained some famous fans, including officials at the Smithsonian Institution, the Guggenheim family and aviator Charles Lindbergh, all of whom quietly funded his research at various points in his career. The increasing visibility of his donors and his rocket launches—and some well publicized noise complaints from his Massachusetts neighbors—pushed him to find a more remote place for his rocket research, and in 1930 he moved his laboratory to Roswell, New Mexico. 

By World War II Goddard’s rocket research was advanced enough that he attempted to offer his services to the U.S. armed forces. But though he did briefly work with the Navy on jet-assisted takeoff and liquid propellants during the war, his dreams of using large rockets to put cargo, people, and scientific instruments into space were not taken seriously by much of the skeptical scientific establishment. Goddard had previously predicted that German scientists were developing their own advanced rocketry, but the U.S. was slow to recognize the technology’s potential. 

Thus, Nazi German scientists developed their own rockets independently. The V-2 rocket, a liquid-propelled missile, became the first rocket to leave Earth’s atmosphere in launch liquid-propelled rockets, and the V2 rocket eventually became the first to leave Earth’s atmosphere in late 1944. By then, Goddard was terminally ill with throat cancer. He died on August 10, 1945.  

(How Operation Paperclip brought Nazi scientists to the U.S.)

Robert Goddard’s scientific legacy 

Ironically, much of Goddard’s work—and his recognition as a pioneer who made spaceflight possible—only came to fruition after his death. As the United States attempted to beat the Soviet Union into space during the 1950s, scientists found that Goddard’s relatively primitive rocket experiments in the 1920s and 1930s had laid the foundation for successful rocketry in the new space age. 

Today, liquid-fueled, staged rockets using fuels such as hydrogen and liquid oxygen are the norm, and as Goddard predicted, they managed to make space travel possible first for satellites, then for human beings. 

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Goddard’s contribution to spaceflight was so crucial that NASA named a Maryland facility after the scientist. The Goddard Space Flight Center was involved in every aspect of the first American spaceflights. And the planned Artemis mission, which will send astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, will use the technologies Goddard helped pioneer. 

As the teenage Goddard predicted, yesterday’s dreams often remain tomorrow’s hopes—and Goddard’s work will continue to fuel the space exploration of the future. 

(Artemis II: An inside look at NASA's journey back to the moon)