David A. Clary - Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

T HIS F LIGHT W AS S IGNIFICANT , A S I T W AS THE F IRST

H E T OOK H IMSELF T OO S ERIOUSLY

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams; Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

Arthur William Edgar OShaughnessy, Ode

Those who knew Robert H. Goddard, Americas first rocket scientist, liked him. One of his most likable traits, they all remembered, was his sense of humor. He was always ready with a joke, enlivening every situation, no matter how discouraging, with a quip. After his death in 1945, remarkably, none of his friends and associates could recall a single one of his jokes. All that was left of his humor was the memory of its former existence, empty of substance. Goddard the humorist was like the Cheshire Cat, faded away except for his smile.

So it was with Goddard the rocketeer. Between World War I and World War II he was the most famous scientist in America, the most heavily publicized in the world. The newspapers covered him more often than either Thomas Edison, who died in 1931, or Albert Einstein, who arrived in the United States the following year. He was portrayed as the dedicated physicist who all alone made rocketry respectable, who turned it into a science. He aimed to send rockets to high places, even to the moon and planets.

Because he enjoyed the support of influential scientists, philanthropists Daniel and Harry F. Guggenheim, and the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, the world believed that Goddards ambitions were not only feasible, but were about to be realized. When Nazi Germany launched rockets into the stratosphere and down onto Allied cities, Goddards career in rocketry appeared also to be one in prophecy.

Unlike Goddard the humorist, Goddard the rocket man enlarged in image after his death. He was proclaimed a modern prophet, without honor in his own land until too late, who had begun life as a sickly, precocious genius, a boyhood visionary who perceived humanitys rocket-driven future in space years ahead of anyone else. He dedicated his life to realizing that vision, pressing ahead with determination and pluck despite widespread ridicule and the refusal of his own government to appreciate the importance of his work. Single-handedly, it was claimed, he invented modern rocketry in all its details, including those used by the Nazis to bombard London.

In the aftermath of World War II, the story went, no rocket or jet plane could take to the skies without using Goddards inventions. In 1960, the United States government confessed to stealing the mans ideas, and paid $1 million in compensation to his heirs. Three years later, a best-selling biography called This High Man fleshed out the Goddard the world had come to know. Monuments and medals rained upon his memory, along with institutions bearing his name. Robert H. Goddard was the father of modern rocketry and spaceflight.

At his moment of posthumous triumph, when he loomed larger than life, Goddard began to fade from view. First, in the interest of international good feeling, he had to share the title of father of space flight with two other fathers, a Russian and a German. Then he became discounted as a man of fine accomplishments but little influence in his field. Because of his alleged secretivenessthe solitary endeavors that had made him so newsworthy during his lifeit was said that modern rocketry had actually been reinvented by others. Moreover, his failures had greatly exceeded his successes.

The man who formerly had put America on the road to the Moon became a footnote in the history of technology. Again like the Cheshire Cat, he faded away until little remained but a series of juvenile biographies counseling youngsters to remain true to their dreams, to realize that persistence is the road to achievement.

The remarkable rise and fall of Robert H. Goddards image owed to the fact that his real life was hidden behind a dense veil of legend building. He began fashioning a public persona as early as 1919, and continued it to the end of his lifeone of the more surprising discoveries during this research was that the legendarily publicity-shy scientist was actually a publicity hound, who garnered reams of praise but almost no ridicule.

The legendry accelerated after his death, engineered by Goddards widow, Harry Guggenheim, and Charles Lindbergh, culminating in the carefully scripted This High Man. That produced a reaction among other rocketeers and historians, who toppled the erstwhile father of space flight from his pedestal.

There was a real human being hidden in the shadows cast by the legends, and he was different from any of the manufactured images. Goddard the man was a complicated and often inscrutable individual, a self-contradictory person whose flaws waged a lifelong war with his virtuesa human being rather than a myth. He actually was a towering figure in the history of modern technology whose real accomplishments should have been enough to make legend building unnecessary. What he achieved was far more than his detractors in the past generation have suggested, even if less than his boosters in the previous generation claimed.

Robert H. Goddard the rocket man deserves a fair account of his life and his contributions to the history of rocketry and spaceflight. So does the question of how, beginning in his lifetime and accelerating in the decades since, he nearly disappeared into conflicting mythologies, making him either the Mount Rushmore of rocketry or a mere show horse in a field where he had little real influence. In an age when image building and spin doctoring dominate our public discourse, when the manufacture of personalities is a major industry, the life and legends of this remarkable scientist have something to teach us about what is really important in the swirl of lives and lies.

His adventure began with a dream. Once, not so long ago, seventeen-year-old Robert Goddard had a waking dream about flying farther than anyone ever had, to other worlds in the sky. He was not the first person to have such a vision, of course, but it was new to him, and it would not let go of him. In the present day, we have watched fellow humans venture into space, and walk on the Moon, and we have seen earthly machines visit other worlds in the sky. It becomes easy to take such things for granted, unless we remember how fantastic they would have seemed a century ago. To paraphrase Charles Lindbergh, we ought to ask ourselves whether Robert Goddard was dreaming then, or we are now.