ABSTRACT
Robert Hutchings Goddard was born on October 5, 1882, in the central Massachusetts industrial city of Worcester. Single-minded in his dedication to the idea of space flight, he entered the local engineering college, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Goddard taught physics briefly at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but, upon receipt of his PhD. in physics in 1911, he accepted a research fellowship at Princeton University, realizing that his aptitude for research exceeded that for teaching. He spent a year at home recuperating, and by 1914, was well enough to conduct a series of experiments with tiny rockets propelled by a smokeless powder of his own devising. The two world wars bounded, and greatly influenced, Goddard's working life. As the deviser of the first successful liquid-fuel rocket and as a tireless explorer of the theoretical and practical problems of rocketry decades before the subject gained substantial support in the United States, Goddard stands as the great American pioneer of space travel.
