Robert Goddard

Goddard holding his 10-ft. "Nellie" on his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, MA, that became the world's first liquid-fueled rocket to be successfully launched, on March 16, 1926, rising to 41 feet in a 2.5-second flight.

1882 - Goddard was born Oct. 5, in Worcester, MA. He grew up a frail child, and in 1898 his imagination was sparked by reading H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.

1899 - On Oct. 19, Goddard climbed a cherry tree at a friend's home in Worcester, and dreamed of spaceflight: "I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet."

1903 - Russia's Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published "Exploring Space with Reactive Devices," the first great rocketry study.

1909 - On Feb. 2, Goddard described in his growing notebook a rocket that employed liquid-hydrogen fuel and a liquid-oxygen oxidizer.

1914 - Goddard received patents No. 1,102,653 of July 7, 1914, and No. 1,103,503 of July 14, 1914, for a combustion chamber and nozzle, the use of successive liquid propellant, and multiple rocket stages.

1916 - The Smithsonian gave Goddard a grant of $5000 to fund his rocket research. During WWI, the Signal Corps gave him a grant of $20,000 to develop a rocket weapon. By the time of the 1918 armistice, he had developed a recoilless rocket to be fired by a single infantryman, a weapon never used in WWI but was developed by Goddard's associate, Clarence N. Hickman, into the bazooka of WWII.

1920 - Goddard published the first of only two rocketry papers he would ever write.

1923 - Hermann Oberth published The Rocket into Interplanetary Space in Germany.

1926 - Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket, and over the next 13 years built models that climbed past 9,000 ft. and surpasses the speed of sound.

1930 - Charles A. Lindbergh persuaded Daniel Guggenheim to give Goddard $50,000 to fund a new rocket research center at Roswell, New Mexico.

1931 - Germany tested its first liquid-fueld rocket that would be developed into the V-2 weapon in WWII.

1932 - Russia tested its first liquid-fueld rocket.

X-2 rocket plane
1942 - In July, Goddard moved to the Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis to work on a Navy rocket. He developed a variable-thrust rocket motor that became the basis for the motor used on the Bell X-2 rocket plane that first flew November 18, 1955. Newsreels recorded the X-2 flight of July 23, 1956, that set a world speed record.

1944 - Germany, inspired in part by homegrown rocketeer Hermann Oberth and in part by Goddard, launched the first V-2 rockets against London and Paris.

1945 - Robert Goddard died August 10, the holder of 214 patents. German rocketeers, led by Wernher von Braun, were brought to America to design rockets for the U.S.

1957 - The U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite.

1958 - The U.S. answered with the smaller Explorer 1.

1959 - The first three Atlas ICBM missiles became operational at Vandenberg AFB in California.

1961 - The U.S.S.R.'s Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space; America's Alan Shepard followed the next month.

1967 - NASA launcheed the 36-story Saturn V, then, and still, America's largest rocket.

1969 - Apollo 11, launched by a Saturn V, landed the first men on the moon.

1981 - The U.S. launched the first space shuttle.

1986 - Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing seven astronauts; the next month, the U.S.S.R. launched the first component of the Mir space station.

1995 - First American astronaut flew aboard Mir.

1998 - Construction began on International Space Station.

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revised 2/20/07 by Schoenherr