Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926. The first lasted 2.5 seconds. In 1920 the Smithsonian Institution published Robert's paper on rocket conceptions. At the end of the article, Robert began to hint his thoughts for the future by detaling his plans for launching a small unmanned rocket that would be sent to the moon, where it would strike the surface and explode its payload of flash powder so that people with telescopes could see where the rocket had landed. Goddard found himslf ridiculed by the press. The prestigious New York Times dismissed Goddard's ideas and said that he did not even posess an elementary knowledge of physics. Luckily, Charles Linbergh took an intrest in Robert's concepts and decided to help finance shis work on rockets. Lindbergh also convinced Daniel Guggenheim to help fund Robert and move his entire operation to Eden Valley, near Roswell, New Mexico. In the desert, Goddard did some of his best work. Despite all this work Robert and his rockets were generally unknown to the American public and many of his ideas went unrecognized until several decades after his death in 1945.