The little boy was sick—again. He was often ill, so he missed a great deal of school. While that may have made some children happy, Robert Goddard hated missing school; he loved learning, especially about science.
Born in Massachusetts in 1882, Robert eventually made it through elementary and high school and then attended Worchester Polytechnic Institute. He later received his PhD in physics from Clark University and became a college professor.
Although he did well in his role as an academic, Robert’s real love and obsession had always been the idea of flight—a very specific kind of flight. He dreamed of building rockets that would allow mankind to explore our universe and touch the stars. Keep in mind, this was a time when the Wright brothers had only barely managed to fly a few feet off the ground. Virtually no one believed that rockets could fly into space orbit—no one but Robert. But because he was so far ahead of his peers, he encountered great difficulty in finding funding for his research. By 1915, he was almost ready to give up.
Fortunately, Robert’s work in the field of rocketry became known to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution, home at the time of our country’s most forward-thinking scientific minds. The Smithsonian agreed to provide funding for Robert’s research and, during the next decade, it published some of Robert’s most important and influential works. In 1926, Robert proved that his theories worked by launching the first liquid-propelled rocket. In 1929, he launched a rocket with a camera and barometer onboard, the first time any scientific instruments were placed into orbit around the earth.
By the time he died in 1945, Robert Goddard had been granted more than 200 patents for his work with rockets and early theories of space flight. Less than a quarter of a century later, his theories born of his childhood and lifelong dreams, would carry the first humans to the moon.
Just as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp. Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. ? Robert H. Goddard
Have an AWE-full weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué