Robert Goddard would not live to see the modern space age, but long enough to see its potential. He had begun the liquid fuel rocket era with a launch exactly 93 years ago in Massachusetts. He worked on increasingly sophisticated rockets on shoestring budgets until WWII, when he developed Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) for rockets allowing heavily laden planes to lift off. He saw the recovered remains of von Braun's V-2and knew what was ahead for space exploration. He also knew he could have supplied the U.S. with equivalent rockets if he'd had the backing and funding. "I don't think he ever got over theV-2," one acquaintance said.
But what he DID do was more than enough to cement his place as a founder of the modern space era. Countless patents on guidance, control systems, better rocket engines, etc. formed the technical underpinnings of the American space effort.
Happy birthday, Doc. You were ahead of all of us.
23 before he launched the world's first liquid-fuel rocket, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published the ideal rocket equation. As the Wikipedia article on it says, this equation "captures the essentials of rocket flight physics in a single short equation."
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation