7 Robert Goddard 7by Means of Rockets,” which many years later was hailed
by the Soviet Union as the forerunner of space flight. The
other member of the pioneer space trio—Hermann
Oberth of Germany—published his space–flight treatise,
Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, in 1923, four years after
the appearance of Goddard’s early monograph.
Goddard’s early tests and others were modestly
financed over a period of several years by the Smithsonian
Institution, whose secretary, Charles G. Abbot, had
responded to Goddard’s appeal for financial support. In
1929, following an aborted and noisy flight test that
brought unwanted press notice to the publicity-shy
inventor, Charles A. Lindbergh was instrumental in pro-
curing greater financial assistance for Goddard’s
experiments. From 1930 to the mid-1940s, the Guggenheim
Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics financed the work
on a scale that made possible a small shop and crew and
experimental flights in the open spaces of the American
southwest, at Roswell, N.M. There, Goddard spent most
of his remaining days in the unending trial-and-error reach
for high altitudes.
Experiments at Roswell
In the course of his experiments there he became the first
to shoot a liquid-fuel rocket faster than the speed of sound
(1935). He obtained the first patents of a steering apparatus
for the rocket machine and of the use of “step rockets” to
gain great altitudes. He also developed the first pumps
suitable for rocket fuels, self-cooling rocket motors, and
other components of an engine designed to carry man to
outer space. Furthermore, his experiments and calculations
took place at a time when any news of his work drew from
the press and the public high amusement that “Moony”
Goddard could take seriously the possibility of travel