奇速英语

现代导弹推动力之父Robert Hutchings Goddard

As scientists mark the 45th year since the Apollo 11 lunar landing, a lesser known anniversary last week quietly passed the world by.

Almost one hundred years ago today, Massachusetts-born Robert Hutchings Goddard received a revolutionary patent for a liquid-fuelled rocket. The patent, which was joked about by journalists at the time, paved the way for the Apollo moon landings and helped bring about the dawn of the ‘space age’. Dr Robert Hutchings Goddard — today considered the father of modern rocket propulsion — was a modest man who went largely unrecognized for his early work.

He first caught the attention of academics as a student in 1907 after a cloud of smoke from a powder rocket fired in the basement of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute physics building. In 1914, Goddard received two US patents. One was for a rocket using liquid fuel. The other was for a two- or three-stage rocket using solid fuel. By 1916, he had developed the mathematical theories of rocket propulsion. Toward the end of a 1920 report, Dr Goddard outlined the possibility of a rocket reaching the moon and exploding a load of flash powder there to mark its arrival. The Times picked up Goddard’s scientific proposal about a rocket flight to the moon, however, and doubted about the feasibility of such a thing.

By 1926, Dr Goddard had constructed and successfully tested the first rocket using liquid fuel based on these patents. For astronomers, the flight of Dr Goddard’s rocket on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, Massachusetts, was as significant to history as that of the Wright brother’s first flight.

As Apollo 11 was racing moonward, the New York Times published a correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. As Dr Goddard once said: ‘It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.’”