 History is the most human love endeavours, since humans alone possess a conscious memory and can learn from it. If the lives of great men so often seem cold and inhuman, maybe it's because their lives are told in paper dates and stone monuments. Robert Goddard was the discoverer of the world of the rocket. He understood its workings and its potential, before most people understood the tin mizzy. The world did not discover him until after his death in 1945. Today, he is widely recognized as a great man of science, and the greatness can be found in his work. Robert Goddard, who dared to take a first step into space, man's great adventure. He did not stand in for him, but it had to be, because my husband died at 62. He should have had more years to work, to organize his materials and summarize things. In the years that I have worked on his papers, I have constantly had the feeling that Bob would have done all this much better than I. I think I'm the next best thing, because I care more. My husband was a product of New England and Boston. He was born in Worcester, in August, in October of 1882, of Yankee Stock. He lived in Boston for the first 16 years of his life, and then returned to Worcester. He was just an average schoolboy and showed no special aptitude in mathematics. However, he read a good deal of early science fiction, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. But the idea of making something that would fly into space came one day when he was 17 years old in Worcester. He had climbed a cherry tree to trim off some branches, and as he looked across the meadow, he had a daydream about how wonderful it would be to make something that would go higher than anything had ever gone before. During his college years, the dream wouldn't be put away. It wouldn't down. It was strengthened by what young Goddard taught himself and what he learned in school. He studied physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, later at Clark University in the same Massachusetts town. Here, near the physics building at Clark University, Goddard tried out his first rockets over and over again. Every now and then, a sign of lift-off, like the flaring of a match, but nothing more. Then he attended Princeton University, arriving just as its president, Woodrow Wilson, was abandoning old NASA for greater responsibilities. At Princeton, he studied further, developed a theory of rocket propulsion, and he had taken out a few patents just in case. Then Goddard fell victim to tuberculosis. After recovering, he became a teacher of physics at Clark. He continued, however, to teach himself new things, a process known as research. What he battled on for a dream is persistent. You cannot ignore it. And a man's dream, however private, can be shared. Yes, it was at this time that he came back to Clark and I met him. I had become Secretary to the President of the University. He asked me to type his reports about the work during the war, and I was proud to do so. One report was published in January of 1920, a footnote in it, mentioned in a small type the possibility of a rocket such as described in the text. Was capable of reaching the moon with a ratchet flash powder, enough to be visible through telescopes from the Earth. He submitted a carefully written paper to the Smithsonian Institution, which granted him, in early 1917, the sum of $5,000. It was given for the strictly scientific purpose of exploring the upper atmosphere. However, as my husband worked, it came to him that he had a really potent weapon. He wrote the Smithsonian again and asked them to inquire if the military would be interested in such a device that he was working on. This was a single charge, solid propellant rocket. The U.S. Signal Corps was interested and financed the work throughout the year 1918. Just before the armistice, he showed it at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. This profiled beautifully and was shelved later on. It became, however, the Bazooka of World War II. Of course, the armistice meant that interest in the development of weapons almost vanished. In Germany, scientist Hermann Obertham's colleagues were electrified by Goddard's dream. They corresponded with Goddard for a while, then silent. Here in America, the sensation left the community of scientists unimpressed. With the Smithsonian grant, Goddard built a rocket launch tower at Auburn, Massachusetts, and began to step up the pace of his experiments. Here, he made many tests, static, and flight of the liquid propellant rocket. There, of course, were many failures, but there were just enough successes to keep our spirits up. The first real success happened on March 16, 1926. 41 feet up it went, this first liquid-fueled rocket, and so began space exploration at Auburn. Only a beginning, but a beginning is something more than a dream alone. Goddard wrote of iron propulsion engines, which were in the dream stage. He wrote of solar sails on his rockets that would gather light from the stars for outbound travel. He wrote of freezing human protoplasm for space flights that would otherwise exhaust the lifespan of man. He dreamed, but he also worked. Three years after his first flight, his rocket went twice as high. It made such a noise that the state fire marshal banned any flight to the moon from the southern soil of Massachusetts. So Goddard shifted his rocket base to a Shell Park artillery range. Here at Fort Devons, the work went on. He had a visitor one day, so famous that the town was truly impressed. Charles Lindberg, the lone eagle, symbolic of the air age, talked to his older counterpart who would in time become symbolic of the space age. Money was needed, and Lindberg had the name to pry open the pocket books. It took some doing a whole year. It was Harry Guggenheim, naval aviator in the First World War who came true. A long time friend of Lindberg's, Harry went to his father Daniel, the mining financier. Even though the Guggenheim fund for the promotion of aeronautics was already in existence, Daniel Guggenheim provided his own personal funds, $25,000 per year for four years. And thus Robert and Esther Goddard transferred the rocketry business out of Massachusetts, out to where the land is stock and empty. We set up a machine shop on Mescalero Ranch, which we rented. And later we set up a static test tower close to the shop. This is where the rocket was anchored down and the scene of the many early tests. Later we established a launching tower 10 miles northwest of Roswell, out on the prairie. It was 60 feet high, but later increased to 85 feet high. The rockets of that time were brought out on a trailer and were rather crude, but still much larger and much better than what he had been able to do at crack in his spare time. For him it was seventh heaven to spend all day every day on rocket research. No attempt was made in these rockets to make it light because these were not intended for flight. The three main problems we had to attack were propulsion, guidance, and recovery. The propulsion required many static tests at the very beginning, and it took about two months of static testing. By December of 1930 we thought the establishment going very well had made up the basis of static tests to try better propulsion methods, and in December of 1930 we had a first well-fined flight in the Mexico. Static tests require all kinds of gauges to make sure that we know what is happening in every part of the anchored down rocket. A moving picture camera takes pictures of these gauges. The tests usually began with a caravan in the early morning across the desert on a trailer. In the early days the trailer was rather small. Later we had a very large four-year one. We also started with a modest Model T truck, but later we had a very fancy panel truck. This was a happy day for the boys who had to keep that Model T running. The rocket even in 1940 was the same cigar shape as we have now to take to Maduro. Of course it was not fueled until after it had been placed in the launcher. These were light rockets, usually running about 12 feet high, although they varied from model to model. Our control wires were rolled out on the prairie and stretched from the launching tower to the shelter. After all the controls were set, all the tanks had been fully fueled and checked. All the staff took the Model T and went up to the thousand foot shelter. Each man had his precise piece of observation to undertake. One of course had a stopwatch to check the length of time of flight. One threw the switches for the electrical controls. Another had field glasses to note any revolution about its own axis of the rocket. And 3,000 feet away from the tower was a recording telescope manned by one of the observers. A cloud of black smoke allowed the movie camera operator to follow it a little more easily. This is an early informal picture of a device that my husband developed to persuade a patent office examiner to grant him certain claims in a patent covering a gyro to guide a rocket. It is very difficult to understand the principle of the gyroscope and no blame should be attached to the patent office examiner. He got his patent on the basis of this device. The gyro operates under a very special system of laws, but it is the heart of the rocket. It controls the two sets of wings that my husband developed to guide a rocket in space. One set is movable into the blast, down low. The other set is a little higher up and are folded against the side of the rocket. The first are called the blast wings and the second set are called the wings movable into the streamline. In order to test the actual operation of these two sets of wings from the gyro, we honed the rocket on our static test to encounter the other shot and tilted it in various directions to make sure that our was going well. A viral rocket contained a parachute, in fact two of them, one for the cap itself to come down on and one to help the main rocket to come down. It also contained a biograph from the National Aeronautics Association to make an official record of whatever altitude it might contain. The pump turbines were very complicated indeed. My husband had hoped that various pump companies might undertake to develop these because after all he was not a pump engineer. But all were shaken by the needs that he expressed. It had to be extremely high speed, which was perhaps attainable by the companies, but the matter of extremely lightweight was the one that stopped them. They said it would cost so much that they couldn't undertake the work. My husband sent a blueprint to one pump engineer who had impressed him well and the engineer wrote back that the drawings were very good indeed and he thought there was a chance they would work. So my husband's employees from those drawings made the pumps and turbines that are now in the rocket from the National Energy Agency. Engineers who have seen this rocket had modeled at the quality of work, the close challenges that his staff were able to maintain. We had a few flights with a pump turbine rocket before the war clouds came down from the desert near Roswell. Hitler was reaching great distance. In taking and removing pictures of these flights it was necessary to gauge just from the point where propulsion visibly sees how high the coasting would go and then where it would tilt downward and where the parachute would blast. You see here a very beautiful descent by parachute. This was quite a problem to solve for this matter of reentry so that we could salvage a good portion of the rocket. It is difficult to have a parachute open at the maximum height because the conditions were so at that time. We could salvage a good deal more than half the rocket usually if it came down by parachute. In 1930 Daniel Guggenheim died. Later Goddard's grant was suspended and work was stopped. But after two years back at Clark University Goddard returned to New Mexico for the grant was renewed by the Guggenheim Foundation itself. The very day after their return to Mescalero Ranch came a visitor, Charles Augustus Lindberg whose purpose was to spur on the deliberate Goddard in his work. May 1935, Nell climbed 7500 feet the highest to date. The town of Roswell was a fruitful town for the Goddards. Oh yes indeed. The 30s were the golden years of the Goddards. We had a very pleasant place to live. The climate that was good for the rocket was also very good for my husband although that was only incidental. And he could rest evenings at a nice cool country hall, paint on Sundays when he liked. He could also play the piano and he occasionally went to the nice air-cooled building picture theater to see Raul and Heidi and some of his good-law, some of his other favorites. May 1937, Nell had grown to 16 feet five inches long. Off she went. She rose higher and more nearly vertical than in any other previous flight, Goddard told his diary, between 8000 and 9000 feet. This was the high point of the space effort entirely unofficial of the United States of America. In 1939, Goddard and Lindberg met for the last time. The meaning of the visit, let's move fast. They didn't know how much ahead of us the Germans were in this new science of rocket trade. As the war in Europe broke out, Robert Goddard tried to interest the United States Army Air Corps in the potentiality of the 500-pound rockets that had been evolved. Harry Guggenheim, in the name of the Guggenheim Foundation, offered his private money to back up the defensive power of America. My husband came to Washington and joined Mr. Guggenheim when the latter offered the entire shop in Roswell, the staff, my husband's services, and the all-knowledge know-how that had been worked out down there. My husband described what he had, showed the film. The military were politely interested, but they could see no future in the rocket as a separate weapon. They did envision it as a possible adjunct to the airplane in existence. This would be a jet-assisted takeoff. One member of the meeting was a representative from the Army Air Corps, and I think he shot almost everyone present by remarking that World War II would be one with mortars. The second thing that was, of course, much more pleasing to us was that a procession of young flyers had begun to come to Mescalero Ranch. These were fighter pilots or also some of the commercial pilots who had gained a keen sense of the limitations of the propeller, and they knew something fresh had to come. They were interested in this rocket. They thought possibly this was the answer, at least for bursts of power that might get them out of trouble in a pinch. He went to Annapolis, sometimes running as many as 50 tests a day. Number 1942 is Jato, or jet-assisted takeoff motor, which was put on a PBY flying boat and tested on the Severn River. The angle of climb was a lot better already than from propeller thrust alone. The rocket as a means of transportation was on its way. On the sixth time, the pilot disconnected the safety device and burned the tail. The X-2 airplane, rocket-driven, was the next stage in the evolution of Goddard's rocket. Soon would come the X-15, the sounding rockets, the orbiting rockets. But Goddard was older now and ill. It was in 1944 that England and then the entire world discovered how well and how secretly the Germans had done their homework. Robert Goddard was dead at the age of 62, a victim of cancer. A generation has passed since Robert Goddard died. Space is no longer so distant from that long ago cherry tree where a boy dreamed a dream that would not down. The boy became a man and said, it is difficult to say what is impossible for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. My husband felt that he was a very fortunate man and I think few who knew him, even Mr. O'Reilly, could not sense that my husband was a highly gifted and a very, very happy man because he was doing precisely what he wanted to do most in all this world. As someone said a long time ago, the pursuit of truth is more precious than the attainment of it.