Len Lanetti
Cleared for Takeoff
Found this in a very unlikely place...1999 Annual Report of a financial service company....not entirely sure of the accuracy but found it interesting anyway.
From his Aunt Effie’s farm in Massachusetts, physicist Robert Goddard launched the space age in 1926 with a pipelike, ten-foot rocket that flew all of two and a half seconds. Heartily ridiculed by the New York Times some years earlier for his unorthodox idea that rockets might someday
reach the moon, Dr. Goddard persevered in spite of public
disbelief. In 1930, backed by financier Henry Guggenheim, he
moved to Roswell, New Mexico, now best known as the place where many
people believe aliens have landed. Within years, Goddard had
liquid-fuel rockets climbing as high as 9,000 feet.
Before German V-2 rockets began raining down on London in
World War II, Goddard went to U.S. military leaders and explained
how rockets might be used to attack from long distance. They, too,
dismissed him, only to discover after the war that the Germans built
their rockets using Goddard’s 200 public patents and technical papers.
Goddard died abruptly in 1945, and never saw how his ideas became the
powerful Saturn moon rocket. In 1969, after men had walked on the
moon, the New York Times admitted that it had been wrong about
Dr. Goddard’s theories 49 years earlier, and “regretted the error”.
He was the original rocket scientist.
From his Aunt Effie’s farm in Massachusetts, physicist Robert Goddard launched the space age in 1926 with a pipelike, ten-foot rocket that flew all of two and a half seconds. Heartily ridiculed by the New York Times some years earlier for his unorthodox idea that rockets might someday
reach the moon, Dr. Goddard persevered in spite of public
disbelief. In 1930, backed by financier Henry Guggenheim, he
moved to Roswell, New Mexico, now best known as the place where many
people believe aliens have landed. Within years, Goddard had
liquid-fuel rockets climbing as high as 9,000 feet.
Before German V-2 rockets began raining down on London in
World War II, Goddard went to U.S. military leaders and explained
how rockets might be used to attack from long distance. They, too,
dismissed him, only to discover after the war that the Germans built
their rockets using Goddard’s 200 public patents and technical papers.
Goddard died abruptly in 1945, and never saw how his ideas became the
powerful Saturn moon rocket. In 1969, after men had walked on the
moon, the New York Times admitted that it had been wrong about
Dr. Goddard’s theories 49 years earlier, and “regretted the error”.
He was the original rocket scientist.
