March 16th: Today in 1926 Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket. The launch was unspectacular, going up only 41 feet, but it was the basis for much of modern rocketry. Goddard was a visionary and spent most of his life mocked by those idiots that seem to always emerge to mock visionaries. The New York Times famously editorialized

“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react - to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

They retracted when we finally landed on the moon but Goddard was long dead by then.

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