Liquid-propelled rocketry has continued to be the staple of spaceflight ever since.
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The entire journey took less than three seconds, but March 16, 1926, had just become the date of the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket flight, and Dr. Robert Goddard had just become a father of modern rocketry.
READ: From Cabbages to Countdowns: NASA Marks 100 Years of Modern Rocketry.
“It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind,” Goddard wrote in his journal the next day.
Goddard, who filled Nell up with a blend of gasoline and liquid oxygen, became the first in the world to build and successfully launch such a rocket.
Liquid propellant would offer greater thrust control than solid fuel, but the benefit accompanies tricky challenges, like how to pressurize, and control the rate of fuel mixture.
Recognition was slow to arrive — ridicule came faster. In 1920, The New York Times opined that Goddard’s work in rocketry and his suggestion that such a device could reach the Moon was “a severe strain on credulity.” But Goddard pressed on, refining and retooling his rockets over the years.
At the dawn of the Space Age and with Esther Goddard championing her late husband’s work (Dr. Goddard died back in 1945), the true significance of the Clark University professor’s work became clearer.
NASA named its’ first new complex the Goddard Space Flight Center in his honor back in 1959.
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