Goddard's Rocket (1926): The First Liquid-Fuelled Rocket Launch

On 16 March 1926 the American physicist Robert H. Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket from a snowy field on his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The flight lasted about two and a half seconds and covered only some 56 metres, but it proved that liquid propellants could power a rocket. That principle would later carry satellites and astronauts into space, making Goddard’s modest launch one of the founding moments of the space age.

Background: from fireworks to science

Rockets had been used for centuries, from Chinese fire arrows to the war rockets of the Napoleonic era, but they all burned solid gunpowder-like fuels that were hard to control and relatively weak. Around 1900 a few thinkers began to treat rocketry as a route to space. In Russia, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published theoretical work in 1903 showing that liquid propellants would be more efficient, though his ideas were little known in the West.

Goddard, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882, had dreamed of spaceflight since his teens. As a young physicist he received two US patents in 1914, one for a multi-stage rocket and one for a rocket fed with liquid fuel. While teaching at Clark University in Worcester he tested solid-fuel rockets and, with a grant from the Smithsonian Institution, published his monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes in 1919.

Ridicule in the press

Goddard’s 1919 paper was mostly technical, but it suggested that a rocket might one day reach the Moon and signal its arrival with a flash of powder. Newspapers seized on the idea. In January 1920 a New York Times editorial mocked him, asserting that a rocket could not work in the vacuum of space because it would have nothing to push against. This was wrong: rockets work by Newton’s third law, expelling exhaust in one direction to move in the other, with or without air.

The episode made Goddard wary of publicity for the rest of his life. He worked largely in private, shared few details with other researchers and became known as a secretive figure. Nearly half a century later, on 17 July 1969, as the Apollo 11 astronauts headed to the Moon, the Times published a brief correction acknowledging its error.

The launch of 16 March 1926

From the early 1920s Goddard turned to liquid propellants, which promised far more energy and control than solid fuel. The technical problems were severe: liquid oxygen boils at about −183 °C, and the fuel had to be fed steadily into a combustion chamber that would not melt.

The rocket he took to Auburn in March 1926 looked unlike later designs. Its small combustion chamber and nozzle sat at the top, while the tanks of gasoline and liquid oxygen were below, connected by thin pipes inside a light metal frame. Goddard believed placing the motor in front would help stabilise the flight; he later abandoned this layout. The rocket stood about 3 metres tall, including its launch frame.

On the afternoon of 16 March, with his wife Esther, his assistant Henry Sachs and Clark University colleague Percy Roope present, Sachs ignited the motor with a blowtorch on a long pole. For some seconds the rocket simply roared in the frame while the fuel burned off weight. Then, as Goddard recorded in his diary, it lifted off, rose about 41 feet (12.5 metres), turned over and crashed into the frozen ground about 184 feet (56 metres) away. The flight lasted about 2.5 seconds at an average speed of around 60 miles per hour (about 100 km/h).

A photograph of Goddard standing beside the slender rocket and its frame in the snow, taken around the time of the test, became one of the most reproduced images in the history of spaceflight. Goddard himself treated the flight as an experiment rather than a triumph and immediately began planning improvements.

Key people

• Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945): physicist and inventor who held more than 200 patents in rocketry, many granted after his death.
• Esther Goddard (1901–1982): his wife, who photographed and filmed many of his tests and later managed his papers and patents.
• Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974): the famous aviator, who visited Goddard in 1929 and helped him secure private funding.
• Daniel Guggenheim (1856–1930): philanthropist whose family fund financed Goddard’s work in New Mexico.

After Auburn: Roswell and beyond

Goddard did not announce the 1926 flight publicly; he reported it to the Smithsonian, which was funding him. A noisy launch near Worcester in July 1929 attracted police and reporters, and local authorities barred further tests in Massachusetts. The publicity, however, brought him to the attention of Charles Lindbergh, then a national hero after his transatlantic flight of 1927. With Lindbergh’s support the Guggenheim family agreed to fund Goddard’s research.

In 1930 Goddard moved to Roswell, New Mexico, where open desert allowed larger launches. Over the following decade his team developed gyroscopic guidance, steering vanes in the exhaust, fuel pumps, cooling methods and lightweight construction. Some of his rockets of the mid-1930s reached altitudes estimated at about 2.5 to 3 kilometres. During the Second World War he worked on rocket-assisted take-off for aircraft for the US Navy. He died of throat cancer in Baltimore on 10 August 1945.

Consequences and legacy

Goddard’s secrecy meant his influence on others was more limited than it might have been. In Germany, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket into Planetary Space in 1923, inspiring amateur societies and, later, an army programme under Wernher von Braun that produced the V-2 ballistic missile. After the war, American engineers examining captured V-2s noted how many features resembled Goddard’s patents. In 1960 the US government paid $1 million to Esther Goddard and the Guggenheim Foundation for the use of his patents.

Liquid propulsion became the basis of almost every major space launcher, from the rocket that carried Sputnik 1 into orbit in 1957 to the Saturn V that sent astronauts to the Moon. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, founded in 1959, bears his name, and the Auburn launch site was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Goddard invented the rocket. Rockets were centuries old; Goddard’s achievement was the first liquid-fuelled flight and much of the engineering behind it.
• Myth: Goddard was the only pioneer. Tsiolkovsky in Russia and Oberth in Germany developed rocket theory independently, and the three are often called the founding fathers of astronautics.
• Myth: the first rocket was a failure. The flight was short and the rocket was damaged, but it achieved exactly what Goddard intended: proof that liquid propellants could lift a rocket.

Timeline

• 1882, 5 October: Robert Goddard is born in Worcester, Massachusetts.
• 1914: Goddard receives patents for multi-stage and liquid-fuelled rockets.
• 1919: The Smithsonian publishes A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.
• 1920, January: New York Times editorial ridicules his ideas.
• 1926, 16 March: First liquid-fuelled rocket flight at Auburn, Massachusetts.
• 1929, July: A launch near Worcester attracts press and police attention.
• 1930: Goddard moves his work to Roswell, New Mexico, with Guggenheim funding.
• 1945, 10 August: Goddard dies in Baltimore.
• 1969, 17 July: The New York Times publishes its correction during Apollo 11.

Why it matters

Goddard’s two-and-a-half-second flight was the first proof that the liquid-fuelled rocket, the engine of spaceflight, actually worked. His later innovations in guidance, pumps and cooling anticipated much of modern rocketry, and his story remains a reminder that ideas dismissed as fantasy can become reality within a lifetime.