Robert H. Goddard

By the end of World War I, America was a world power.

And in March 1926, a professor named Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket from a farm in Massachusetts.

It flew for two and a half seconds and landed in a cabbage patch.

Forty-three years later, rockets carried Americans to the moon.

And we all knew it had something to do with a rocket ship.

in Worcester, some guy named Robert Goddard in a rocket ship, but this is just my child brain, right? Like, I don't know.

It's like something about rocket ship and this guy's famous, but I don't know how famous he is.

I never really showed up or paid attention to that part of history until today, until today, because today I started to look up what the proper way is to kind of publish on your podcast, what a true retraction would be, what a true correction would be, because I had it wrong all these times.

So I scrolled down and the next one was the Goddard Retraction.

And I'm like, oh my goodness, I recognize that name.

So Robert Goddard was born in Worcester.

He was educated at Worcester Polytechnical Institute that they're very proud of still to this day.

The first employee was a guy named Neal Stephenson, who's a very famous science fiction writer.

And Stephenson wrote this blog post about most of his job was trying to figure out if there was a different way to get to space than the way Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun and all, you know, a century of rocket science had considered.

And so for three years, they were in Kent, Washington.

Blue Origin was basically a, a, an experiment.

... out there at the labs.

Um, and a- another little interesting tidbit here, uh, my wife, uh, I'm married to, uh, recently Uh, she's a direct descendant of, uh, Robert Goddard.

He was another one of my childhood heroes.

Okay, yeah.

I, I live in, uh, New England now, and I saw one of these little painted wood blocks like people have of, you know, outdoor saints and stuff.

And there was one with, uh, Goddard and his little frame rocket there.

I says, "That's got Robert Goddard [laughs], and she's like, "You know who he is?" And I'm like, "Yeah."

Oh, yeah.

For most of its early life, it was a ranching and farming community built on cattle, sheep, and the artisan wells that made growing anything out there possible at all.

had a military school the new mexico military institute and it has surprisingly rich place in rocketry history because from 1930 to 1941 the physicist robert goddard the father of modern liquid-fueled rockets conducted his experiments on a ranch outside of town so before a single saucer ever crossed the sky Roswell was already a place where strange metal objects were being launched into the sunlight and occasionally coming back down in the desert.

By the summer of 1947, Roswell was a town of roughly 12,000 people, and it had a very important neighbor on its outskirts.

The Roswell Army Airfield had been built during the war as a training base, but in late 1946, it became the home of the 509th Bomb Group.

That's one thing you can do.

Yeah, I mean, and the reality is that, as I think Robert Goddard, who was one of the space scientists, said, everything's impossible until you do it.

People may not think it's possible to reform the court, but there are certainly provisions in the Constitution that allow Congress to do so, to make changes, to unpack the court, to restore a court that would be modest and fair.

And we're going to have to take that on at the earliest opportunity.

April 2nd, 1926.

A rocket designed by Professor Robert H. Goddard of Clark University in his experiments to explore the upper air strata was sent through the air in an isolated part of Worcester this afternoon like a flaming meteor with a roar heard for two miles around.

The noise was such that residents called police headquarters saying that an airplane was shooting along on fire.

Two police ambulances scoured the area looking for victims, and an airplane left Grafton Airport to aid the search.

It was later learned of the experimental launch, and pub- and the public has since been warned of possible future tests in the coming weeks.

The experiments mark the climax of 17 years of work by Professor Goddard to design a projectile that can penetrate the upper air regions.

Professor Goddard has the financial backing of the Smithsonian Institution as well as Clark University." Well, damn, nobody must have read the newspaper lately.

No one said a thing about this.