Robert H. Goddard

Goddard successfully launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts. The flight lasted just 2.5 seconds and reached about 41 feet in altitude, but it proved the viability of liquid propulsion.

Goddard did not work for NASA directly—he died in 1945, more than a decade before NASA was founded in 1958. However, his pioneering research on liquid-fueled rockets laid the theoretical and practical groundwork that NASA later built upon for the space program.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, named in his honor, is located in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was established in 1959 as NASA's first major space research laboratory.

Goddard published his foundational paper 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes' in 1919, which outlined the theoretical principles of rocketry. Famously, the New York Times ridiculed his suggestion that rockets could work in a vacuum—a correction was issued in 1969 after the Apollo 11 Moon landing.