Kansas is fortunate to have a premier space museum - the Kansas Cosmosphere. It has a great history museum, complete with a Lunar Lander from the Apollo missions (of course, not one that actually went to the moon), a V-1 rocket, and lots of artifacts from both the US and USSR space programs. It also has theaters, like the Justice Planetarium, the iMax, and Dr. Goddard’s Lab.
Robert Goddard was the father of American Rocketry. A physicist by training, he was also a gifted inventor. Goddard constructed and tested successfully the first rocket that used liquid fuel. In terms of rocketry, this event (March 16,1926, at Auburn, Massachusetts) was as important as the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk.
He earned his Ph.D. in physics at Clark University in 1911 and went on to become head of the Clark physics department and director of its physical laboratories.
In 1920 he published a paper titled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes in a Smithsonian Miscellaneous Publication No. 2540. In this report he detailed how he spent the grant money from the Smithsonian, which is all well and good, but at the end he put in an idea for sending a rocket to the moon and exploding a flash of gunpowder there to mark its arrival. While the US press ridiculed the idea, several copies of his report made it to Germany, where it was taken quite seriously. The German Rocket Society was formed in 1927 and the German Army began a rocket program in 1931.
In 1929, he lauched the first scientific payload (a barometer and a camera) on a rocket. Other firsts include
- First proved, by actual static test, that a rocket will work in a vacuum, that it needs no air to push against
- First received U.S. patent in idea of multi-stage rocket (1914)
- First developed gyro control apparatus for rocket flight (1932, New Mexico)
Goddard died on August 10,1945, four days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.
Goddard was awarded 214 patents for his work, 83 of which came during his lifetime. Goddard crater, on the Moon, is also named in his honor.
His hometown of Worcester established the Goddard School of Science and Technology, an elementary school, in 1992.
The Goddard Library at Clark University is named in his honor.
For some more information on Goddard, you can read his biography at Wikipedia or the NASA Facts page on him at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was established in 1959 and named in his honor.
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