Important People

...Done That

The people in the page before got the solar system and many other concepts correct. However, one problem remained. There were no rockets to prove these theories! With this problem in their mind, these two men set out to prove that launching objects into orbit was possible.

Building the actual rocket

American professor Robert Goddard can be said to be the father of modern rocketry. He single-handedly developed and built the first liquid-fuelled rocket, which took Nazi Germany years of hard works by hundreds of scientists and millions of dollars. He also developed many systems that are still being used today. An example is a rocket stabilizing system. His early rockets often tipped over too soon and crashed. He developed a stabilizing device using a gyroscope.

    However, his success did not come easily. In the beginning, the rockets he built did not fly very high. The Smithsonian Institution, which was funding him, expressed disappointment with his results. Newspapers even printed: "Moon Rocket Misses Target by 238,799 1/2 miles". Due to the noise created by his test, he was forbidden to test rockets on State Land. Luckily, an important person took an interest and was excited about Goddard's work. The man was Colonel Charles Lindbergh, America's aviator hero and a good friend of famous philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim. Goddard soon received a $50,000 two-year grant, which he used to set up his headquarters at Eden Valley, Roswell, New Mexico. There he launched many rockets, fine-tuning the practical and theory of rocket launching. However, the United States Government were not as interested in his work as the Germans were. The V2 that took many scientists and engineers to build was basically a larger Goddard rocket with explosives.

    It was only in 1960 did the United States Government acknowledge his contribution to the space program and awarded him one million dollars, which was a very large sum of money at that time, for infringement of his copyrights and for the continued use of his copyrights.

If Robert Goddard is the father of modern rocketry, German scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun would be its mother. Separated by the Pacific Ocean and a wartime wall of secrecy, Goddard, and von Braun came up with basically the same design. Goddard built the first liquid fuelled rocket, but von Braun expanded on the idea, eventually coming up with a monster of a rocket, the Saturn V, producing about 12,000 times the thrust then the best rocket Goddard built. Without von Bruan, the astronauts may not have landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969.