Robert Goddard arrived at his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, US, on a cold, snowy morning 100 years ago.

The wide-open spaces of the farm became on March 16, 1926, a rudimentary Cape Canaveral for an event never witnessed before on Earth — the launch of a rocket that would become a trailblazer for vehicles capable of sending satellites, probes and even humans beyond our planet’s atmosphere.

“The Wright Brothers took us into the air,” said Kevin Schindler, a historian at Lowell Observatory
in Arizona, US, and co-author of Robert Goddard’s Massachusetts. “Goddard took us beyond.”

Goddard, born on October 5, 1882, in nearby Worcester, had grown up with an interest in science and was fascinated by the works of science fiction authors H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. As a 17-year-old in 1899, he climbed a cherry tree and imagined developing a vehicle to travel to Mars.

From then on, he devoted his studies and work to the pursuit of rocketry, becoming a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester in 1914, at age 31. Here, alongside his teaching, he started to conduct rocket experiments.

Goddard and two other scientists — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany — independently realised in the early 20th century that liquid fuels were the key to space travel.

Goddard faced scorn and criticism from a variety of corners. He experimented with his design. He opted for gasoline as a propellant because liquid hydrogen was unavailable. He named the rocket Nell.

The shape of his vehicle resembled the crude outline of a rocket drawn by hand. Fuel lines traced the body, allowing liquid oxygen and gasoline to combine and produce explosive thrust from the rocket’s nozzle at its top. Goddard would relocate the nozzle to the rocket’s base on future launches for stability, a design that remains favoured today.

The rocket was transported in parts and then assembled near a cabbage patch on the farm by Goddard, his wife Esther and two assistants. So was a stand that was anchored into the ground to stabilise the rocket before it launched. The launcher stood three metres above the frozen ground.

“Goddard worked in pretty much isolation,” Schindler said. “He had a team he worked with, but he had them sign waivers” to prevent them from sharing information.

Over the course of his life, Goddard would file more than 200 patents to protect his work.

Rocket launches are now routine. There were more than 300 in 2025.

Today’s space launchers carry thousands of Starlink Internet satellites from SpaceX, powerful space telescopes that study the early universe, probes that hurtle toward the sun and beyond Pluto, and people to and from the International Space Station and the Chinese Tiangong space outpost.

The space programmes of the US and China also plan to send humans to the moon in the coming years. For all the leaps and bounds in launches over the past century, modern rockets had to get off the ground somewhere.

With Goddard’s rocket all set up, all that remained to do was ignite it.

Goddard’s assistant Henry Sachs did this by using a blowtorch attached to a long stick. It lit an igniter at the top of the rocket and an alcohol tank at the bottom. Sachs then took shelter behind a nearby wooden barrier before Goddard turned a valve to open the fuel lines, mixing the liquid oxygen and gasoline in a combustion chamber.

There was no formal countdown.

Instead, Nell slowly burst to life, burning off excess fuel before it flew off, as Goddard described it, “at express-train speed” at 2.30pm.

Esther Goddard had a camera but it only worked for seven seconds at a time before the film needed to be replaced. The rocket did not lift off as quickly as anticipated, so the camera missed the actual launch. Footage taken before and after showed the ignition and the rocket’s smoky trail.

It climbed about 12.4 metres into the air, vertically at first but then tilting sideways into an arc because it had no guidance system. The vehicle crashed into a cabbage patch 56 metres away, skidding to a halt, with a total flight time of just 2.5 seconds — shorter than the first flight of the Wright Brothers in 1903.

Transformational as the event would prove to be, it received barely a mention at the time.

Goddard conducted three more launches from his aunt’s farm, reaching altitudes up to 27.4 metres while improving the fuel system of the rockets and even experimenting with parachute recovery.

The launches continued to receive little fanfare until 1929, when he was forced to move elsewhere after neighbours raised the alarm about a fire caused by one of the tests.

With help from aviator Charles Lindbergh, Goddard, his wife and his team relocated to Roswell, New Mexico, to continue his work. He would launch some three dozen rockets in total — with one reaching an altitude of about 2,740 metres — until his death from throat cancer on August 10, 1945.

Goddard died without receiving the acclaim most say he deserved, perhaps because he was “a little early” to the scene, said Whitman Cobb of Air University, the US Air Force’s military education system.

“Nobody really believed this was something that was doable,” she said. “Goddard is almost this thrown-away visionary.” Yet his work undoubtedly laid the foundations for most of modern space travel.

NYTNS