Robert Goddard: The Father of Modern Rocketry Essay example -- essays

Robert Hutchings Goddard was a futurist. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 5, 1882. He was the son of a machinist and his father was known for his luster with machinery and tools. The Goddards moved from Worcester to Boston turn Robert was just an infant, because his father went in half and half on a local machine tools shop. In Boston, is where the immature Robert Goddard spent his youth as an solitary(prenominal) child, and most of his jr. years were spent alone at home due to his scrams grislyness with tuberculosis. Robert would not see his familys hometown of Worcester again until he was seventeen in 1899. much(prenominal) of his life was spent as an ill child (Spangenburg, 10), and he was an average student with an aversion to mathematics. Illness unbroken him out of school entirely in that autumn of 1899, and by this quantify Robert had only completed his freshman year of high school. Although he was otiose to spend a lot of time within institutional walls, the three-year-old Goddard was not without a strong yearning to learn--at least to learn information. Much of the time he spent throw at home sick was consumed reading the Scientific American, or books from the library both science and science fiction novels-especially H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, a novel he would look back often in later years (Burrows, 32).Robert Goddard found happiness while doing his chores and often used found this time for relaxing. Like many young seventeen year olds, the time was spent daydreaming and this was the case on the 19th day of October 1899. Little did the young man know that this creation in his diary would change his entire life As I looked toward the fields in the east I imagined how wonderful it would be to nock some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale if sent up from the meadow at my feet. . .It seemed to me that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, miserable more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by faithfulness of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive. (Yost, 145)This new idea was known as the linear-force-from-eccentric-rotation, and although it was only a daydream of the young man, it was the spark that would ignite Goddards unendin... ...f his research, the artificer was able to accomplish his goal of creating a rocket capable of flight, and his creation would later reach the stars. Furthermore, had his work been sponsored by the Armed Forces after the introductory World War, the space race would have not been such a challenge for the United States (Yost, 144). Dr. Goddard is still revered and remembered as the Father of red-brick Rocketry.WORKS CITEDBurrows, William. THIS NEW OCEAN THE STORY OF THE FIRST post AGE. bracing York Random House, 1998.Freeman, Marsha. HOW WE GOT TO THE MOON T HE STORY OF THEGERMAN PIONEER. Wash DC twenty-first Century Science, 1993. Lehman, Milton. THIS HIGH MAN THE LIFE OF ROBERT GODDARD. brisk York Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963.Levine, Alan. THE MISSILE AND SPACE RACE. WestportPraeger, 1994.Spangenburg, Ray & Moser, Diane. SPACE EXPLORATION OPENINGTHE SPACE FRONTIER. New York Oxford, 1989.Stockton, William & Wilford, John. SPACELINER. New York Times, 1981.Time-Life Books. OUTBOUND VOYAGE THROUGH THE UNIVERSE. Richmond Time-Life, 1989.Yost, Edna. MODERN AMERICANS IN erudition AND TECHNOLOGY.Second Ed., New York Dodd, Mead, 1962.