Robert Goddard

Robert Hutchings Goddard was an American physicist, inventor and engineer regarded, alongside Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, as one of the founding figures of modern rocketry. On March 16, 1926, near Auburn, Massachusetts, he launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, a brief flight of about two and a half seconds that reached roughly 41 feet, and between 1926 and 1941 he and his small team launched 34 rockets, eventually reaching altitudes of 2.6 kilometers and speeds of 885 kilometers per hour. He held 214 patents covering technologies including multi-stage rockets, gyroscopic guidance and steerable, thrust-vectoring engines, and his 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes helped inspire international rocket research even though his own work drew ridicule from the press and scientific establishment during his lifetime. He also developed a precursor of the bazooka during the First World War, and the technical foundation he laid proved central to the later Space Age.