Robert Goddard was born in 1882. When he was a child, he became interested in firecrackers and thought about the possibility of space travel. He later became a physics professor at a university. In his free time, he built rockets and took them to a field, but they didn’t fly.
When he went back to his university after his failed attempts, the other professors laughed at him. In 1920, Goddard wrote an article about rocket travel. He believed that one day it would be possible to go to the moon. When The New York Times saw his article, a reporter wrote that Goddard had less knowledge about science than a high school student. Goddard wanted to prove that The New York Times was wrong.
In 1926, he built a ten-foot rocket, put it into an open car, and drove to his aunt’s nearby farm. He put the rocket in a field and lit the fuse. Suddenly the rocket went into the sky. It travelled at 60 miles per hour to an altitude of 41 feet. Then it fell into the field. The flight lasted 2½ seconds, but Goddard was happy about his achievement. Over the years, his rockets grew to 18 feet and flew to 9,000 feet in the air. No one made fun of him after he was successful.
When Goddard died in 1945, his work did not stop. Scientists continued to build bigger and better rockets. In 1969, when the American rocket Apollo 11 took the first men to the moon, The New York Times wrote: “The Times regrets the error.”
