Reaching for the moon

WORCESTER - Today he's remembered as the father of modern rocketry.

Were it not for Worcester's Robert Goddard (1882-1945), man's trip to the moon 50 years ago would not have gotten off the ground.

The Clark University physics professor who created the world's first liquid-fueled rocket was as responsible for the dawning of the Space Age as the Wright brothers were for the beginning of the Air Age, declares the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which named its first space flight center after him.

Pakachoag Hill in Auburn, where Goddard launched his first rocket in 1926, is "the Kitty Hawk of space exploration," said Laurie Leshin, a NASA scientist who is president of Goddard's undergraduate alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

"This is the place where it all started," Ms. Leshin said on a visit this past week to the site of Goddard's first rocket launch, memorialized by a small obelisk near the ninth fairway on what is now Pakachoag Golf Course in Auburn.

"Those of us who are space scientists benefit every day from the technology that he invented and the vision that he had," said Ms. Leshin, a member of the Mars Curiosity rover team who once worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"We couldn’t launch rovers to Mars or astronauts to the moon without Robert Goddard," she said.

On Friday, commemorative model rockets were launched from the golf course in his honor.

Yet in his day Goddard's genius was not widely recognized. His theories on space travel and experiments with rockets were mocked in the press. He was labeled the "Moon Man."

"GODDARD SENDS ROCKET ACROSS CITY'S SKYLINE" announced a front-page headline in the morning Telegram on July 18, 1929. "Clark Professor Creates Furore When Celestial Demon Roars Over Auburn in Name of Science."

The Worcester Evening Post front page on July 17, 1929, proclaimed in large type: "TERRIFIC EXPLOSION AS PROF. GODDARD OF CLARK SHOOTS HIS 'MOON ROCKET.' Woman Thought Rocket Was Wrecked Airplane. Ambulance Rushed to Auburn to Care for 'Victims of Crash,' Find Clark Professor and Assistants Making Experiments With Rocket."

The Telegram, in an editorial, "The Ways of Rockets," commented on July 19, 1929: "Despite the inventor's reticence and our lack of the higher scientific training we are convinced Professor Goddard has demonstrated the capacity of his rocket to faw down and go boom."

Fordyce Williams, coordinator of archives and special collections at Clark's Robert H. Goddard Library, said, "Some newspaper articles treated (his work) seriously. A lot of it was treated lightly.

"I think he was seen as an eccentric scientist," Ms. Williams said.

In 1919 the Smithsonian Institution published Goddard's manuscript, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," which speculated on the possibility of space flight and reaching the surface of the moon by rocket. The Associated Press picked up on the journal article and papers around the country had a field day.

"There were jokes, there were cartoons," said Ms. Williams. " 'Oh, now we have a rocket to the moon, who are we going to put on it?' He was called ‘Moony.' He got people writing him letters, volunteering to be passengers on his rockets to the moon or Mars."

A New York Times editorial on Jan. 13, 1920, suggested Goddard lacked a basic understanding of Newtonian physics. "That professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react - to say that would be absurd," the Times wrote. "Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

By all accounts Goddard was stung by the ridicule in the press, but he kept up with his research.

On March 16, 1926, he launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket from his Aunt Effie's farm on Pakachoag Hill - a place name that means "turning point" in the Nipmuc language, observes James Rice, NASA Mars rover scientist.

"Although his rocket, 'Nell,' only flew for 2.5 seconds, reaching an altitude of 41 feet and a distance of 184 feet that ended up in a cabbage patch, this rocket was the forerunner of every rocket we use today to explore space," Mr. Rice writes.

That launch was done in secret by the publicity-shy Goddard, according to The Associated Press book "Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace and Everything Else."

The AP writes: "Three years later, on July 17, 1929, Goddard was ready to launch an 11-foot, 35-pound rocket from the farm. This time reporters were invited to watch. As the rocket rose, it emitted a tremendous roar. After topping out at 80 feet, it landed 171 feet away, the gasoline tank exploding when it hit.

"The racket was heard two miles away and convinced that a plane had crashed, police cars and ambulances converged on the scene. Goddard considered the test a success, but not the newspapers. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch headlined, 'Rocket Starts for the Moon but Blows Up on the Way.' In the Los Angeles Times, 'Man in Moon Turns Green.' ”

Local fire officials put an end to the rocket launches from the Auburn hillside.

Goddard's tests were taken seriously by the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who visited Goddard in Worcester in 1929 to discuss rocketry, and persuaded the Guggenheim Foundation to fund the scientist's work. "Goddard moved his operation to a field near Roswell, New Mexico, where, for more than a decade, he conducted a series of increasingly sophisticated rocket experiments, with flights up to 9,000 feet and speeds approaching supersonic," the AP writes.

At first the military showed little interest in Goddard experiments, but after German V-2 rockets, which drew from Goddard's work, rained devastation on London in World War II, the demand grew for rocket technology, writes the AP.

He had more than 200 patents to his name when he died of throat cancer in 1945. He did not live to see the Space Age that he launched.

On July 17, 1969, as Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon, The New York Times printed a retraction of its editorial knocking Goddard 49 years before. “It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere,” the newspaper wrote. “The Times regrets the error.”

Goddard, who had devoured the science fiction of H.G. Wells as a frail, bedridden teenager, wrote the inspiration for space travel had come to him at 17 while pruning a cherry tree in his Worcester backyard.

"On the afternoon of October 19, 1899, I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of (my uncle's) barn," he wrote. "It was one of those quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England and, as I looked toward the fields to the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars ... I was a different boy when I descended the ladder. Life now had a purpose for me."

For the rest of his life Goddard marked Oct. 19 as the "Anniversary Day" of his greatest inspiration.

The cherry tree is no longer there, having fallen in the Hurricane of ‘38, but the house still stands at 1 Tallawanda Drive in Worcester, looking much as it did. Goddard’s widow, Esther (1902-1982), watched the moon landing on TV there, and a photo from the Telegram of July 22, 1969, shows a delegation of neighborhood children presenting her a congratulatory bouquet.

In a 1976 essay, “A Cherry Tree to Mars,” the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote that the origin of the Viking spacecraft then sending back the first images from Mars could be “traced with utter confidence back to a boy in a cherry tree in a New England autumn in 1899.”

The images sent back from Mars in 1976 provided their own cherry-tree inspiration to a 10-year-old girl in Arizona.

“I grew up in Phoenix, in the desert, and there was something about that stark red landscape that just spoke to me,” said Ms. Leshin, 53. “I just wanted to reach out and touch those rocks.”

The Red Planet has since been the focus of Ms. Leshin’s work as a NASA scientist. She has studied meteorites that blasted off the Martian planet surface and fell to Earth, and has shed light on the history of water on Mars. As a member of the Mars Curiosity rover team, she said, “We have been roving the surface of Mars since 2012 with this absolutely fabulous rover, launched on a multistage liquid-fueled rocket — thank you, Robert Goddard.”

Ms. Leshin said: “The amazing thing about (Goddard) is, in 1914 he patented the idea for a liquid-fueled rocket and a multistage rocket, and that’s exactly what took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon — a liquid-fueled multistage rocket. Nineteen-fourteen was six years after he graduated from WPI. The guy was brilliant.”

Yet this Space Age pioneer is not as recognized as he might be. “We talk a lot about ‘hidden figures’ in the space world,” Ms. Leshin said. “I think Robert Goddard is one of those hidden figures. Those of us in the space business all know who he is. But the general public doesn’t know as much about him.”

One afternoon this past week, Ms. Williams, the Clark archivist, stood on the sidewalk in front of 1 Tallawanda Drive, which today is privately owned. “There’s no plaque, nothing that says it was Robert Goddard’s house,” she noted. Yet one might say the Space Age was dreamed up in the backyard.

“We know him in Worcester,” Ms. Williams said. “You see the sign every time you drive up 290: ‘Birthplace of Robert Goddard.’ I think a lot of people don’t know anything about him.

“He’s not nearly as recognized as the Wright brothers,” she said. “Yet when you think about it, he was as important to rocketry as they were to airplanes. He has never gotten the recognition.”

She mused: “One thing I love to think about is, what would Goddard have thought in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin got out and actually stepped on the moon? I think he would have loved it.”