NASA Celebrates 100 Years of Modern Rocketry

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black-and-white photograph of a man in an overcoat and hat standing next to a slender, 11-foot-tall rocket supported by a metal frame

Photograph of Robert Goddard and his liquid-fueled rocket, prior to its first flight on March 16, 1926, from a farm at Auburn, Mass.

Credits: Esther Goddard, Courtesy of Clark University

Snow covered the ground that Tuesday morning 100 years ago, when a college professor and his wife took a morning drive to the family farm a few miles south in Auburn, Massachusetts. Along for the ride, the couple brought two work colleagues - and "Nell."

They may not have known it at the time, but thanks to Nell, the four New Englanders were about to attend an auspicious birth.

Some eleven feet tall and weighing a mere 10 pounds, Nell was a contraption of the professor's invention. He had devised, constructed, and tested Nell methodically, incrementally, over the course of many, many years.

That snowy morning at Aunt Effie's farm, the professor's assistant took a blowtorch to Nell.

Moments later Nell ascended. The gangly apparatus climbed 41 feet high and landed in a cabbage patch 60 yards away. The entire journey took less than three seconds, but March 16, 1926, had just become the date of the world's first liquid-fueled rocket flight, and Dr. Robert Goddard had just become a father of modern rocketry.

"It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, 'I've been here long enough; I think I'll be going somewhere else, if you don't mind,'" Goddard wrote in his journal the next day.

Robert Goddard's assistant Henry Sachs (left), former student and fellow Clark University Physics professor Percy Roope (middle), and wife Esther Goddard who photographed and filmed much of her husband's work. They stand with parts from the rocket - later named "Nell" - following the flight of March 16, 1926, at Aunt Effie's (a distant relative of Robert Goddard's) Ward Farm in Auburn, Mass. This test marked the world's first successful launch of a liquid-propelled rocket.

Courtesy of Clark University

The idea of a liquid-fueled rocket was not new. Others around the world had been pondering theory and sketching designs for years: Liquid propellant would offer greater thrust control than solid fuel, but the benefit accompanies tricky challenges, like how to pressurize and control the rate of fuel mixture. Goddard, who filled Nell up with a blend of gasoline and liquid oxygen, became the first in the world to build and successfully launch such a rocket.

Recognition was slow to arrive - ridicule came faster. In 1920, The New York Times opined that Goddard's work in rocketry and his suggestion that such a device could reach the Moon was "a severe strain on credulity": How could a rocket function in a vacuum with no air to push against, the newspaper accused. "Of course [Goddard] only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

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