80th Anniversary of First Liquid-Fueled Rocket Launch, Thank you, Robert H. Goddard Options

[ljk4-1]

Though I am sure it can (and will) be argued, this forum and
so much else might not be here today - or at least in a very
different form - had it not been for the work of one quiet and
publicity-shy professor and engineer from Massachusetts who
launched the first liquid-fueled rocket from his Aunt Effie's
farm in Auburn, MA on March 16, 1926.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Goddard_(scientist)

The flight lasted only 2.5 seconds and reached an altitude of
just 41 feet. Nell, as Goddard called it, came down in his aunt's
cabbage patch.

On a technical level, the flight was no more impressive than
the Wright Brothers first airplane flights in 1903, but that is
not what mattered.

A number of Goddard's papers can be found online here, including
his crazy idea of sending a rocket all the way to the Moon where
its impact would be seen by the release of a flash powder:

http://www.si.edu/archives/documents/goddard.htm

Goddard wing of the Roswell Museum:

http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/roswell_pix.html

[David]

Though I am sure it can (and will) be argued, this forum and
so much else might not be here today - or at least in a very
different form - had it not been for the work of one quiet and
publicity-shy professor and engineer from Massachusetts who
launched the first liquid-fueled rocket from his Aunt Effie's
farm in Auburn, MA on March 16, 1926.

A number of Goddard's papers can be found online here, including
his crazy idea of sending a rocket all the way to the Moon where
its impact would be seen by the release of a flash powder:

Goddard's ideas were initially met with a fair degree of scientific skepticism, and Goddard himself worked in some isolation from other experimenters in the same field. The idea of rocket travel through interplanetary space, however, was immediately and enthusiastically received in English-language science fiction!

Before Goddard, if you wanted to send your heroes to strange planets, you had a number of options, including but not limited to:
* Attaching birds to a flying machine and soaring aloft
* Being carried away by demons, angels or djinn
* Going by flying carpet
* Projecting your astral body into another plane where interplanetary travel is swift and easy
* Having your mind projected into another body on your destination planet
* Discovering a miracle metal that isolates you from Earth's gravitational field and building a spaceship out of it

[Edit: I forgot "*Being shot from the barrel of a gigantic cannon".]

After Goddard, all of these devices were dropped, and by 1930, nearly all would-be adventurers in the solar system were jetting around in rocket-ships, if not flying around by rocket-backpack! Although there was very little understanding of what a rocket would look like or how it would behave, something about the concept (as well as its apparent plausibility) was, evidently, quite thrilling, and before very long rockets were adorning the covers of all the pulp magazines. Goddard was celebrated in fiction (getting several fictional rockets named after him!) well before the first practical long-range rockets were launched.

[dvandorn]

Before Goddard, if you wanted to send your heroes to strange planets, you had a number of options, including but not limited to:
* Attaching birds to a flying machine and soaring aloft
* Being carried away by demons, angels or djinn
* Going by flying carpet
* Projectingyour astral body into another plane where interplanetary travel is swift and easy
* Having your mind projected into another body on your destination planet
* Discovering a miracle metal that isolates you from Earth's gravitational field and building a spaceship out of it

The one I always liked best, that you don't list here, was strapping to your body dozens of sealed bottles of water (or was it perspiration?), which, as it evaporated, would rise, lift each bottle a little, and have a cumulative lift sufficient to lift a fully grown human being (*and* a chair for him to sit in) all the way to the Moon.

Space travel was a *lot* easier when we were ignorant of things like the total energy required to move a given mass a certain distance through a gravity well...
*sigh*...

-the other Doug

[deglr6328]

It's so strange to think that by the mid 20's we had general relativity and quantum mechanics but no real useful rocket technology. funny how things work out.

[David]

The one I always liked best, that you don't list here, was strapping to your body dozens of sealed bottles of water (or was it perspiration?), which, as it evaporated, would rise, lift each bottle a little, and have a cumulative lift sufficient to lift a fully grown human being (*and* a chair for him to sit in) all the way to the Moon.

Ah, yes. You're thinking of Cyrano de Bergerac's first attempted mode of travel in Les Estats et Empires de la Lune, where he attaches several bottles of dew to his body -- and since, as we all know, dew falls at night and rises in the morning, what better way to lift off?

Unfortunately, Cyrano discovers that the rising of the dew is accompanied by its attraction to the Sun, and not wishing to visit the Solar Empire just yet, he breaks open some of the bottles and comes down in the howling, horrible wilderness of -- Québec, having neglected to take into account the rotation of the earth (sic).

Since Québec isn't quite the Moon, Cyrano has to build another machine, with wings, which predictably crashes. A bunch of soldiers from the Québec garrison discover the remains of his machine and decide that it will be fun to attach a bunch of fireworks to it, rocket it into the air and see if its wings will flap. Cyrano, desperately trying to save his construction, hurls himself into it as the fuses are lit, and is launched toward the Moon!

So Cyrano actually achieved rocket travel 270 years before Goddard -- unfortunately, his invention, like so many of the marvelous machines of the 17th century, was not followed up.

[Astrophil]

Another for the list of non-rocket methods - Icaromenippus, by the Greek satirist Lucian (2nd century BCE), describes Menippus attaching the right wing of an eagle to one of his shoulders, the left wing of a vulture to the other, and flapping. This gets him the 350 miles to the moon from where he gets some nice orbital views of the earth.

I suppose it's a private mission of a sort.

[ljk4-1]

The Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University in Worcester, MA
has a lot of online resources:

http://www.clarku.edu/research/archives/goddard/

One question for the forum: Does anyone have a copy or transcript
of Goddard's famous essay which he hid in a safe to await a future era
that would appreciate his really far-out concept: Saving humanity from
the era when the Sun dies by heading out to find another solar system
to live in.

His assumption was that if the people of his era could not handle a
relatively simple unmanned rocket launch to the Moon, discussing a
plan to send the entire future human species to another star system
would have planted him in the looney bin.

[climber]

I guess this one count as liquid propelled: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6...ideo-spoof.html

[ugordan]

Nope, it's clearly a solid booster judging by the exhaust smoke.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Goddard's collection sits in the Roswell Art center New Mexico, which has a "spaceflight" wing with a reconstruction of his atelier and some Apollo 17 flown items. I've visited the museum in 2008 and the best part of the museum is the backside where a complete launch tower stands outside the building near the Planetarium. So don't forget to walk around the building
http://roswellmuseum.org/collections/art.html