Though he had some greater success with later experiments, none of them approached anything like ‘extreme altitudes’ – at least by his own definition. His first liquid fuelled rocket reached 41 feet, landing in a nearby cabbage patch. But let’s face it, he never got anywhere near space flight. And he now has a lunar crater named in his honour as well, of course, as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. His meticulous paper on ‘A method of reaching extreme altitudes’, published by the Smithsonian Institute in 1919, earned him longstanding public ridicule from which he never really recovered.Īt least Goddard would prove his critics wrong in the end. Goddard is plainly an important figure – a pioneer of early rocketry, and the first to experiment with liquid propulsion.

As with many of their ‘This Day in History’ tweets – TDIH for short – it is the little details that are the most fun. Yesterday, according to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum twitter feed, was the 99 th anniversary of the day Robert Goddard filed his first patent for a ‘rocket apparatus’.

Frank malina