So if it weren't for him, Christa McAuliffe might still be alive.

Great article.

All this, and there's still no Worcester/Auburn spaceport. We got screwed.

It's all your fault, New York Times!

joev: All this, and there's still no Worcester/Auburn spaceport. We got screwed.

Worcester and Auburn aren't celebrating the anniversary. No events planned at all.

Well, except it's Double Popcorn Basket night at The 99.

What about Roswell, NM? They have a nice musuem with a replica of his workspace in it. Maybe they'll do something.

Auburn has some left over rockets next to the fire station and a crappy plaque on the golf course.

Worcester named a road on the airport hill after him, and a "proposed" park.

See? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to change the world.

Wait, maybe it does.

Ditto.Great article.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blrocketTsiolkovsky.htm

I'm pretty sure this Russian dude was there first.

Is it just me, or is that picture photoshopped?

Ahh, American ingenuity at its finest. God bless you Robert Goddard.

Also, the lesson to learn here is to never let the Germans have anything technical, because it always turns out bad for everyone else. For example, the VW Cabriolet. ;-)

tuberculochris:Is it just me, or is that picture photoshopped?

I don't think they had Photoshop back in 1938.

tuberculochris: Is it just me, or is that picture photoshopped?


Ya, I was thinking the same thing. Looks like they took the photo and then illustrated the rocket later.

Shenanigans.

If only the fuse had been attached to Prescott Bush...

2006-03-16 06:17:18 PM inkling79

tuberculochris:Is it just me, or is that picture photoshopped?

I don't think they had Photoshop back in 1938.

---------------

They didn't. It's a obvious fake using the computer in Lukket's picture.

Let's celebrate by launching a bunch of rockets into Iraq.

Sorry, wrong thread

I need a fuse like that

fromgav
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blrocketTsiolkovsky.htm

I'm pretty sure this Russian dude was there first.

That all depends on what you mean "first". He was the first to theorize some of this technology, but Goddard was the first to actually make it work (and it is also questionable how much Goddard based his work on anything done by Tsiolkovsky as virtually no one had even heard of him in the US until the 1950's).

So, you can give Da Vinci credit for theorizing helicopters, but I really think you need to credit Bahyl and Sikorsky for actually building a working one (Bahyl built the first one to fly, and Sikorsky built the first one to actually fly well).

What color were Christ McAuliffe's eyes?



Blue. One "blue" this way, the other "blue" that way....

/sigh...

Scopa: Ya, I was thinking the same thing. Looks like they took the photo and then illustrated the rocket later.

I concur...the hazy contributes to notion.

/If only Goddard could see the world he helped usher in today!

Goddard?

Nobody's using the airport. Might as well turn it into a spaceport.

At least then NASA would have more concrete reasons for cancelling launches.

And now the Iranians will use his spirit of invention to lob a nuke into the States in 3-4 Years.

Yay!

DarthBrooks:
So if it weren't for him, Christa McAuliffe might still be alive.

Yes a badtaste joke. Tres Fark.

Of course Christa McAuliffe died because of a fault with a SOLID FUELED ROCKET.

Goddarrd is responsible for LIQUID FUELED ROCKETS.

\I'm sure you knew that.

Yes a badtaste joke. Tres Fark.

Of course Christa McAuliffe died because of a fault with a SOLID FUELED ROCKET.

Goddarrd is responsible for LIQUID FUELED ROCKETS.

\I'm sure you knew that.

Guilt by association? The solid fuel rocket was attached to a liquid fueled rocket.

Fact: Robert Goddard invented the bazooka. I don't mean the principle, I mean the actual thing.

I believe the photo is real.

Scroll down
pops

Look, the culprit was oxygen, OK? You know, one of the essential components of combustion?

Christa McAuliffe's killer is oxygen.

What, no "countdown in 3...2...1..." post?

ifarkthereforiam: I believe the photo is real.

The photo in your link looks completely real, so why the "clean-up" job for the article?

/rhetorical

From now on when a flame war becomes intense enough to give us escape velocity, we should declare that it is "Goddarded".

For those that don't know, NASA named one of their research parks after Goddard. Goddard Space Flight Center.

Photoshop didn't exist then, but touching up b&w photographs had been done for years, to bring out details. This was done frequently on photographs from the Civil War, that were low quality.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of Sherlock Holmes, was duped by altered photographs where fairies were inserted, to the point of publicly declaring that they existed.

And of course, all of the scam psychic photos at the turn of the century.

And, according to Paul Harvey, Goddard's work was published in pamplets and given out free, at the Smithsonian Museum. The general public was non-plussed about rocketry, but visiting Nazis, who picked up some of the pamplets, weren't.

About the only thing I can think of at the moment is they named NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center after him.

batcar01:

Von Braun wasn't a Nazi at the time, and when he did join the party, it was simply for expediency. There's some controversy over wheter he knew about the full Nordhausen story, though.

Sigh, thanks untitled1...

This is from the January 13, 1921 edition of The New York Times:

That Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

Seems the NYT was as full of shiat then as now.

And for his acomplishment, a short obelisk now stands on the 9th hole on Pakachoag Golf Course in Auburn, MA.

Oh the humanity!

BTW, anyone who wants to read the above NYT article in full:

http://it.is.rice.edu/~rickr/goddard.editorial.html

Woo! Happy Robert H. Goddard day!

/GO TECH!

....everyone knows that rockets wont work in the vaccume of space....

I love it... yet another stellar example of one man bucking what was considered established scientific fact and turning out to be correct.

I can see now why I am so amused when people throw "its scientific FACT" at me.

/kooky nutballs ++
//scientific facts --

Oh man, I used to have fun building model rockets.

Do they still let kids do that?

DarthBrooks: joev: All this, and there's still no Worcester/Auburn spaceport. We got screwed.

Worcester and Auburn aren't celebrating the anniversary. No events planned at all.

Well, except it's Double Popcorn Basket night at The 99.

I'm glad. They don't deserve to celebrate this man. You don't get to take credit for someone who you, effectively, laughed out of town. Those people ridiculed him and made it impossible for him to do his work. They deserve zero credit at all for Goddard's achievements, and any statue or monument or holiday they chose to celebrate would be a bitter irony - a testament to how backwards-minded, unfair, and cruel they were to one of the 20th century's great minds.

Let us also not forget German physicist Hermann Oberth.

"Oberth was, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert Goddard, one of the three founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. The three were never active collaborators: instead, their parallel achievements occurred independently of one another."

I bet Sunday afternoons around his house were a blast. No pun intended.