(2 of 9)
Extreme Altitudes. Almost as a foretaste of the current U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the next space pioneer was an American. Robert Hutchings Goddard, born in Worcester, Mass, in 1882, was not only a far-sighted theorist but the maker of the first well-engineered space hardware. In 1915, when he was an assistant professor at Clark University in Worcester, he built solid-propellant rockets, and won a $5,000 grant from the Smithsonian Institution. In 1919 the Smithsonian published a brief Goddard report which predicted, among other things, that a multistage rocket weighing only ten tons could land a small payload on the moon.
Suddenly Goddard had a kind of fame. Newspapers featured him, and the New York Times chastised him for the error (it is no error) of believing that a rocket engine can work above the atmosphere without "something better than a vacuum to react against." Goddard, a sensitive man, was appalled by this notoriety.
By 1922 he was bench-testing in secrecy the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Four years later, he made his first flight tests. His tiny, ungainly gadget, launched from a relative's farm near Auburn. Mass., hardly got off the ground, but it was the true precursor of today's mighty rockets. Three years later, an 11-ft. rocket climbed 90 ft. Its noise attracted the local cops and stirred up so much opposition that Goddard left Massachusetts for thinly populated New Mexico. There his rockets climbed higher and higher. In 1935 one reached the sensational height of 7,500 ft.
Goddard's rockets remained small, but they were not crude. They had all the essential features that later rockets needed to fly out of the atmosphere, including gyroscopic guidance and combustion-chamber walls cooled by flowing fuel. The German V-25 that caused a sensation toward the end of the war followed Goddard's lead without basic innovations.
Soon after the publication of Goddard's 1919 report, rocket enthusiasts began to clot together in little societies. The science of celestial mechanics (motions of the planets) had been highly developed by the astronomers. The astronauts took it over, added some features of their own. Long before World War II, when no rocket had flown above buzzard altitude, they drew charts of imaginary voyages to Mars or Venus that match almost exactly those drawn today.
Placid Space. The best way to think of space as a navigable medium is to imagine the frictionless surface of a calm, glassy pond. Small objects drift across it easily, propelled by feeble forces. Scattered at wide intervals over the mirror surfaces are deep, sucking whirlpools. If a floating leaf drifts close to one of them, it plunges down to the bottom. A self-powered object, say a water insect, that gets sucked into a whirlpool has a terrible time battling back to the surface.
Deep space, far from stars or planets, is like the pond's smooth surface. An object becalmed in its emptiness floats like a galleon in the doldrums. If the object is a spaceship with propulsive power, it can cruise in any direction, meeting practically no resistance. But it must keep away from the whirlpools: the gravitational fields that surround stars and planets. If it plunges into one of them, it may end as a puff of gas in a star or a brief streak of fire in a planet's atmosphere.