Robert Goddard
By: Simon
Robert Goddard By: Simon Boom! There goes a rocket in the sky. Have you ever wondered who invented the rocket itself? Well Robert Hutchings Goddard is your man then. On October 5th, 1882 Nahum Danford Goddard delivered a son named Robert Goddard in Worcester, Massachusetts. As a teenager Robert wrote about an inspiration that came to him as a boy on October 19, 1899:”It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England, and as I look towards the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some small device which had the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if it sent up from the meadow at my feet.” Five years later Robert graduated from school and then began experiments on the efficiency of rockets. Robert brought some commercial rockets and measured their thrust using a ballistic pendulum, a heavy mass suspended by ropes, to which the rocket was attached. The momentum imparted to it. Goddard also used an equivalent set-up, where the mass pushes against a spring, instead of being suspended. In 1922 Goddard went back to his alternative idea, proposed independently by Herman Oberth in Germany: a liquid- fueled rocket. It would have two lines running into its combustion chamber, one feeding fuel, the other oxygen, similar to the way a steel- cutting blowtorch operated, except here both lines carried liquids, not gasses. On March 16, 1926, Goddard flight tested his first liquid-fueled rocket. The rocket burned about 20 seconds before reaching sufficient thrust for taking off. Then it took off to a height of 41 feet, leveled off and hit the ground, all within 2.5 seconds averaging about 60 mph. Goddard died on August 10th, 1945 of throat cancer. Did you know that when Robert Goddard died he was holding 214 patents in rocketry? And he was nicknamed “the father of rocketry.” But he also received little attention for his propulsion research. They are things that were happening in the world that was happening when Robert was planning his invention like on March 18, a French battleship exploded and 640 were killed and on Jan 19, the 1st German zeppelin attacked over Great Britain killing 4 people, Jan 31 the 1st poison gas attack against Russians, and on Jan 3o there was a German submarine attack on Le Havre. Robert Goddard’s invention benefited people because the people can get an idea on how to build a rocket for space flight. But they won’t copy the idea but they would get the concept for ideas on how to build a rocket and get it to go into space. Robert invented a liquid-fueled-rocket that has a limit to how high it can go into the air but you can build an actual rocket that can go into space and you can explore the solar system like astronauts do today. But you can do it but you should acknowledge the work of Robert Hutchings Goddard.
Works Cited
Enotes.com Www. Howstuffworks.com/rocket5.htm www.istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sgodda www.nasa.gov Www. Si archives.si.edu www.space.about.com