The Leaning Factories 285
thers of rocketry and astronautics. Another founding father
is the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who also gave his
name to a conference room.
Another conference room was named after the Amer-
ican Robert H. Goddard. He became an early American
space pioneer and is considered a founding father of rock-
etry and astronautics. In an article from 1919, Goddard
explained how a rocket could travel in the vacuum of
space to the Moon. No one believed him. To prove his
theories, Goddard attached a pistol to a spindle free to
rotate inside a bell jar from which the air was evacuated.
When Goddard fired a blank cartridge, the gun recoiled in
the direction opposite to the escaping gases, and it proved
that his theories were correct. In 1926, Goddard launched
the first rocket propelled with liquid oxygen and gasoline.
The rocket traveled to a height of 41 feet [13 m] and landed
184 feet [56 m] away in a cabbage patch. His team’s later
rockets reached heights of 1.6 miles [2.6 km].^132
A fourth conference room was named after Wernher
von Braun, and there’s a portrait of him hanging in the en-
trance to the SpaceX factory. The German rocket engineer
became interested in space when his mother gave him a
telescope. At school, von Braun found the bookDieRaketen
zu den Planetenraumen[The Rocket into Planetary Space]
by Hermann Oberth. “Its pages were a hash of mathemat-
ical formulas,” von Braun said. “It was gibberish. I rushed
to my teachers. ‘How can I understand what this man is
saying?’ I demanded. They told me to study mathematics
and physics, my two worst courses.” When he realized that