SPACE: The Rocket Dreamer

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It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. —Robert H. Goddard

"Why do you ask us about rockets?" said a captured German V-2 scientist to a U.S. interrogator in 1945. "Ask your own Robert Goddard. We learned about rockets from him." Robert Goddard was a space prophet without honor in his own country. Back in 1926, an obscure professor of physics at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., he heralded the coming space age by sending an ungainly rocket aloft from a snow-covered field at his aunt's farm in Auburn. At the request of alarmed residents, the Auburn police asked him to get out of town. His neighbors in Worcester considered him a crackpot, with his talk of rockets to the moon. They called him "Moony," were relieved to be rid of him when he went West to New Mexico in search of health and more open space for rocketeering.

With financial help from the Guggenheim Foundation, Goddard continued his experiments at Roswell, N. Mex. In 1935 one of his rockets, affectionately dubbed Nell, climbed to 7,500 feet and flew faster than sound. In such experiments over the years, Goddard developed the basics of later rocket technology—gyroscopic stabilizers, fuel pumps, self-cooling motors, landing devices. When diagrams of the Germans' V-2 reached the U.S. in 1944, some scientists observed that the internal structure strikingly paralleled Goddard's old Nell.

Goddard died in 1945 on the eve of the first U.S. test firings of captured V-28, leaving behind 22 volumes of meticulous records that proved to be of immense value to U.S. rocketmen. Six years later, as equal beneficiaries of his estate, Goddard's widow and the Guggenheim Foundation sued the U.S. Government for patent infringements. Last week, in belated recognition of Goddard's genius, the U.S. agreed to a settlement of $1,000,000. It was the largest patent-infringement award ever made by the U.S. Government.