This Day in Scientific History (Death of Robert Goddard, Secretive Space Pioneer)

Aug. 10, 1945— Robert H. Goddard, a physicist who shook off academic bewilderment and even public derision to perfect the principles of rocketry that helped launch the Space Age, died at age 62 from throat cancer in Baltimore, Md.

The importance of Goddard to American aerospace can be summed up quickly enough. C.D.B. Bryan’s The National Air and Space Museum ranks the scientist’s March 1926 launch of the world's first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket as comparable to the Wrights’ maiden flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. More than 200 patents led Goddard, along with Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy and the German Hermann Oberth, to be considered among the three “fathers” of modern spaceflight. In 1959, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) established the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in his memory.

But, listed in such a fashion, the facts in the preceding paragraph are as inert as lines in a deadly high-school science text. Fundamentally, they tell us little to nothing about this pioneer.

They take on more significance—and more interest—when we understand the human being who achieved all this despite society’s misunderstanding and his own imperfections. That is when reading history is transformed, and that is what I’ll try to do in this short space.

Elon Musk’s Space X venture, for instance, would have been inconceivable without Goddard’s advances. (Indeed, another Musk concept, the futuristic “Hyperloop” transportation mode, owes much to another one Goddard’s speculations, contained in a 1905 paper that proposed traveling in a train-like vehicle inside a vacuum tube at very high speeds.)

The irony is that, while thousands around the world applauded in May as Space X carried humans once again, this time in a private commercial venture, into Earth's orbit—and as countless reporters and investors tracked the billionaire Musk’s every Tweet—the socially awkward Goddard was so appalled by ridicule directed towards him that he worked on many of his projects in utmost secrecy—and committed close associates to do likewise.

Introversion had so hamstrung Goddard at the start of his career that he almost gave up what would become his life’s work. Frail from a youthful bout with tuberculosis, he often proved preoccupied and absent-minded in chairing the physics and math departments at Clark University in Massachusetts. Early on, so few colleagues saw value in his work that in 1915, he had to look to the Smithsonian Institution for a lifeline to continue his research.

Not surprisingly, Goddard did not enjoy the instant name recognition that came to Wilbur and Orville Wright as aerospace pioneers. A few years after they made their breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, the brothers demonstrated their machine publicly. 

Unlike Goddard, they remained in the public eye because they formed a business and were ready to battle competitors in court for the credit for their invention. And unlike Goddard’s initial experiments with rockets, which carried neither human beings nor cargo, the ultimate purpose of the Wrights’ invention was easy for the human imagination to grasp: manned flight.

Yet Goddard differs from the Wrights in another sense that might make him more attractive to those fascinated by the lives of inventors: the deep devotion of a spouse. 

Neither Wilbur nor Orville ever married, and they depended crucially on their sister Katharine not only as a sounding board for their ideas but, in the case of Orville after a devastating injury, as virtually a nurse. (When she finally decided to marry, at age 52, Orville stopped speaking to her, only ending their estrangement two years later when she became fatally ill with pneumonia.)

In contrast, for all his shyness, Goddard was able to gain a wife who supported him personally and professionally. During a period in the 1930s, when he worked in Roswell, N.M., with a crew that never numbered more than seven people, Esther Goddard served as official photographer and was responsible for dousing fires caused by rocket exhausts.

Believing her husband to be a great man who never achieved his due in life, she worked unstintingly to ensure that he would in death. It wasn’t only that Esther filed more than three-fifths of the patents eventually credited to him after his demise, but that she mounted a herculean effort to document and promote his achievements. As recounted by biographer David A. Clary in Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age, this included:

*hiring two typists who helped transcribe her husband’s research—a voluminous collection of notes, photographs and photostats of his drawings that eventually amounted to 22 volumes;

*transcribing Robert’s diaries and lab notebooks (a task she was uniquely suited for, as she appears to have been one of the few who could decipher his frequently illegible scrawls);

*kick-started an authorized biography of her husband—then hired another biographer while the first suffered a nervous breakdown;

*helped compile her husband’s papers; and

*lectured extensively on Robert, attempting—successfully, as it turned out—to elevate him into what Clary calls “the Mount Rushmore of rocketry.”

Robert Goddard was fortunate that he had the love of Esther, as well as the support of three influential friends: Charles Greeley Abbot, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who helped him secure funds for his work; aviator Charles Lindbergh, who helped him secure grants from the Guggenheim Foundation; and philanthropist Harry Guggenheim, who not only provided Goddard with funding that amounted to $188,500 but helped bankroll Esther’s effort to preserve her husband’s memory.

But for them, he might have lived out his days in bitter disappointment. The media of the time did not help matters. His 1919 paper outlining his vision, “A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” led to the derisive nickname “Moon Man.” A New York Times editorial attacked him for lacking “the knowledge daily ladled out in high schools.” (The Gray Lady didn’t get around to a correction until 1969—after the launch of Apollo 11.) 

Even a particularly crucial breakthrough of Goddard’s in July 1929—a rocket that reached twice the altitude of his 1926 liquid-propelled launch—provoked snickers because of the noisy proceedings on his Aunt Effie’s remote farm in Auburn, Mass. (The next morning, one Worcester paper ran the headline, MOON ROCKET MISSES TARGET BY 238,799 ½ MILES.)

If man has been able to reach beyond his orbit, it is because figures like Goddard remained undeterred by such ignorant naysayers.