Robert Goddard

Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket on March 26, 1926, from a farm field in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket flew for just 2.5 seconds and reached about 41 feet in altitude, but the flight proved that liquid propulsion systems could work.

Goddard's 1919 Smithsonian publication, 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,' argued that rockets could operate in the vacuum of space and even suggested that a rocket could potentially reach the Moon. The proposal was widely ridiculed in the press, with the New York Times editorializing that he lacked 'the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.'

Goddard was a professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he conducted many of his early experiments. He later relocated his testing operations to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1930, where the open desert allowed for larger and higher flights away from populated areas.

Goddard received relatively little support or recognition from the U.S. government during his lifetime and worked with limited funding. After his death in 1945, his patents and innovations were acknowledged as foundational to the development of the rockets used in the American space program, and NASA named its Goddard Space Flight Center in his honor.