Robert Goddard and the Smithsonian

Former Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Greeley Abbot helped get the Space Age under way. In late September 1916, he received a letter from Robert Hutchings Goddard, a professor of physics at Clark University. "For a number of years," the young academic began, "I have been at work upon a method of raising recording instruments to altitudes exceeding the limit of sounding balloons." Four long paragraphs later, he finally revealed that he had been investigating rocket propulsion.

A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, born in 1882, Goddard earned a B.Sc. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1908) and an M.Sc. (1911) and a Ph.D. (1912) in physics from Clark University. After some important early work in electronics, the young professor began his work on rocketry and spaceflight. In 1914 he patented the design of both a multistage and a liquid propellant rocket and conducted an experiment demonstrating the ability of a rocket to function in space. The work was becoming ever more expensive, he explained to Abbot, and wondered if the Smithsonian could offer any support. 

Abbot was immediately intrigued by Goddard's work. He had followed in Samuel Langley's footsteps, traveling to mountaintops and sending instrumental balloons aloft in an attempt to measure the solar constant, the total amount of solar energy reaching the Earth at the top of the atmosphere. Now he was hearing from a scientist who, in seven pages of exquisite detail, could explain precisely why a rocket was the ideal vehicle to loft instruments above the filtering atmosphere! In less than a year, Abbot had arranged a $5,000 grant to support Goddard's first practical experiments in rocketry.

No one was more pleased than the young scientist's mother. "I think that's the most wonderful thing I ever heard of," she remarked. "Think of it! You send the Government some typewritten sheets and some pictures, and they send you $1,000, and tell you they are going to send four more." It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship. 

The Smithsonian published Goddard's classic treatise on rocketry, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in 1919. The document was a serious engineering study filled with quadratic equations and tabular data designed to prove that existing solid-propellant rockets could carry instruments into space. The author did his best to understate the more sensational aspects of his study, confining his thoughts on the possibility of more efficient liquid-propellant rockets to a footnote and not even mentioning the possibility that human beings might one day ride on a rocket. The paper concluded, however, with a remark that it might even be possible to send a multistage rocket to the moon...

This is an excerpt from "Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: An Autobiography," written and edited by Museum staff.