As Massachusetts continues to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the Worcester area is counting down to a milestone of its own: the centennial of Robert Goddard’s pioneering liquid‑fueled rocket launches in March 1926.
NASA has written that Goddard’s first flight, which reached only 41 feet of altitude, is “as significant to history as that of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.” The launch took place on what is now the Pakachoag Golf Course in Auburn. In 1926, it was a farm owned by Goddard’s aunt.
Why was liquid fuel such an important advance? Unlike solid fuel — chemical mixtures used for centuries as fireworks, signal flares and rudimentary missiles — liquid fuel would prove easier to control with valves and pumps and would allow rockets to be tested before they were launched.
All of today’s big orbital rockets from companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin rely on liquid fuels rather than solid fuels.
Goddard was born in Worcester and educated at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University, where he earned his Ph.D. in physics. He later taught and served as a research fellow at Clark.
Among Goddard’s other achievements, he was the first to put a scientific payload on a rocket, the first to design a gyroscopic system for guiding a rocket’s flight and the first to prove that rockets would work in the vacuum of space.
Many were skeptical of Goddard’s research; some called him “Crazy Bob.” In 1920, a New York Times editorial sneered, “That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College …does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
In 1969, when the Apollo astronauts were on their way to the moon, the newspaper issued a correction. Turns out space travel was possible.
In the months before his death in 1945, Goddard was exploring the possibilities of terrestrial travel inside a vacuum tube — what today is called a “hyperloop.”
At a press conference this morning, representatives of the Museum of Worcester, the EcoTarium, Clark University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute plan to be at Goddard’s birthplace in Worcester to announce a slate of events commemorating the first launch.
The events include a new exhibit about Goddard at the Museum of Worcester, a gathering at the original launch site, seminars at the universities, and a Celebration of Goddard’s legacy at the Hanover Theater. The model rocket company Estes is also selling a 1/5th scale flying replica of Goddard’s 1926 rocket.
The Goddard house, which is not regularly open to the public, will also host tours as part of the centennial.
The house was originally willed to Clark and WPI by Goddard’s widow, Esther. But the schools decided to auction all the contents — and the house itself. When it came back on the market in 2021, it was purchased for $460,000 by Charles Slatkin, founder of the space education nonprofit The Wonder Mission.
Slatkin said he felt it was important to preserve the home because there had been talk about tearing it down and putting up townhomes.
Slatkin said he felt it was important to preserve the home because there had been ”talk about tearing this house down and putting up townhomes.”
On a road trip down to Florida to see the launch of the first Artemis mission in 2022, Slatkin said that he stopped by Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and began reading about what the country had done for the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ accomplishment in 2003.
“I got in the car, and I started to do the math, and I (realized) it was a thousand days until the centennial of the space age,” he said.
Slatkin has been the key player not just in preserving Goddard’s home, but in helping to coordinate next month’s events. “Goddard, and those that carried the torch after him, were the first human beings to have the gumption to point up, and wonder what’s beyond, and explore our universe,” he said.
