[War & Business] The Forgotten Father of Rockets

Robert Goddard conducting a rocket experiment in Auburn, Massachusetts, USA, in 1926. [Image source=NASA website/www.nasa.gov]

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] In 1942, during the height of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill furiously summoned his scientific advisors after witnessing Nazi Germany’s V2 rockets being dropped over the London night sky. Previously, the British government’s scientific advisors had dismissed the V2’s rocket engine as an unscientific hoax. They unanimously claimed that it was impossible to combust fuel and fly at the high altitudes where oxygen is scarce. The problem was that this so-called hoax rocket had already caused 9,000 deaths in London alone.

When Nazi Germany threatened to develop rockets capable of crossing the Atlantic, the United States was also gripped by fear. The American scientific community had also declared rocket engines scientifically impossible to develop, so the shock of the V2 lingered. However, after Germany’s defeat, Dr. Werner von Braun, the developer of the V2 who surrendered to the U.S., shocked Americans even more by stating, "My rocket was based on the American, Goddard’s rocket."

The American scientific community was turned upside down, and the media scrambled to find this figure named Goddard. But the protagonist, Robert Goddard, had died just days before the end of World War II in 1945. During his lifetime, Goddard was merely an unknown researcher from a rural Massachusetts farm. After publishing a rocket engineering paper in 1920 predicting that humans would soon travel to the moon, he was completely ostracized by the scientific community. The New York Times harshly criticized his paper as "a paper written by someone who didn’t even finish high school."

In fact, around the time of World War II, Goddard continuously sent the U.S. military rocket blueprints that could be modified into ballistic missiles. However, the military discarded these materials as unrealistic, and Nazi Germany, conversely, obtained these documents and used them to develop the liquid-fueled engine for the V2 rocket. The glory of space development ultimately went to Dr. von Braun, the enemy scientist who copied Goddard’s rocket engine. After surrendering to the U.S., he founded the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and became the American hero who sent Apollo 11 to the moon.

The stark difference in treatment between the two men was due to their backgrounds. Dr. von Braun came from a prestigious German noble family, and his mother was a member of the British royal family. With his refined appearance and education from Europe’s top technical university, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, his Nazi past was quickly forgotten, and he became NASA’s star figure. In contrast, Goddard suffered from congenital asthma, was introverted, and had few friends. Although he filed over 200 patents related to rockets, no one recognized him. In the American scientific community, he was dismissed as a braggart dreaming of the moon and a scientist obsessed with rockets.

It was only thanks to Apollo 11 that Goddard regained some of the honor he lost during his lifetime. The New York Times retracted its previous harsh criticism of Goddard the day before Apollo 11’s moon landing and praised him as the "father of rocketry." Today, it is widely believed that if the U.S. government and scientific community had recognized his abilities sooner, there would have been no need to rely on the Germans to reach the moon.