Robert Goddard Ignored The Mainstream Media and Created Space Travel

Robert Goddard is widely known as the father of modern rocketry. He designed and launched the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926, and his designs are still used today. But he received little recognition while he was alive and was forced to work in secrecy because of a series of critical articles published in the New York Times. Journalists mocked his theories as impossible, but he was right and he knew it. He stayed the course and is remembered today as the man who ushered in the space age. Hi, I'm John Coogan, and this is how Robert Goddard beat the New York Times. This story is more than 100 years old now, but it's more important than ever, especially for anyone working on new technologies. Robert Goddard was born in 1882 and spent most of his early life in Worcester, Massachusetts. This was just around the time that American cities were first getting electrified, and Goddard became entranced by science and technology. With so much incredible innovation happening all around him on Earth, he started wondering if it was possible to escape gravitational pull and explore the stars. At age 16, Goddard read the War of the Worlds by H.G. wells and was fascinated by the ideas presented in the story. In the book, aliens from Mars invade Earth, and a singular protagonist, played by Tom Cruise in the 2005 adaptation, has to fight to survive. One year later, on October 19, 1899, Goddard climbed a cherry tree to trim dead limbs. While in the tree, he gazed up at the stars and became transfixed. He later wrote, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which even had the possibility of ascending to Mars. But building such a device wouldn't be easy. Goddard was frail and sickly his entire life and suffered from a variety of illnesses that caused him to fall two years behind his classmates. Critics thought it would be impossible for humanity to ever reach space, and his struggles with traditional educational pathways really set him back. But he was still determined to build the rocket he had dreamt of in that cherry tree. So Goddard worked tirelessly, spending days reading scientific texts while unable to attend school and creating his own curricula in service of his ultimate goal, space exploration. His private studies eventually started to pay off, and he gained recognition for his sharp scientific mind. He was able to earn advanced degrees in physics and eventually landed a research fellowship at Princeton in 1913. But his work there was cut short by a terrible bout of tuberculosis. Doctors expected him to die, and Goddard thought death was a real possibility as well. So he scribbled notes as clearly as he could while he was recovering, in the hopes that someone would be able to interpret them. If he were to die after fighting tooth and nail to recover, Goddard spent the next six years consolidating his research into a single coherent work. In 1919, he published a Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes in the Smithsonian. The paper outlined a number of important strategies that would allow a rocket to escape the gravitational pull of Earth first. Among them was the use of a steam turbine nozzle to more efficiently convert the energy of hot gases into forward motion. Goddard anticipated that critics wouldn't believe his results even if he launched a rocket successfully. Once that rocket left visual range, there would be no way for people to see how high the rocket had gone. In order to counter these critics, Goddard proposed sending a payload of flash powder to the moon to set off an explosion bright enough to see from Earth with an ordinary telescope. This would allow any skeptic to independently verify that the rocket had indeed reached the Moon by watching the flash powder explode. But this idea backfired on him. Instead of persuading critics of the validity of his ideas, it made them think he was just a madman who wanted to blow up the moon. The New York Times published a scathing editorial titled A Severe Strain on Credulity and said, after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. This criticism was based on the then common belief that thrust was produced by the rocket exhaust pushing against the atmosphere. But that's not how rockets work. It's actually Newton's third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction that allows rockets to propel themselves in space. Essentially, the rocket is not pushing against the air in the atmosphere, but against itself. Fuel exits the bottom of the rocket and pushes against the structure of the rocket to accelerate upward. Interestingly, this misconception is actually at the heart of many moon landing conspiracies. But you can disprove this idea yourself using widely available equipment, just like the youtubers over at Warped Perception did. They built a vacuum chamber using some plexiglass and an air compressor to suck all the air out. Once the vacuum was sealed, they lit some rocket fuel and observed the force it applied to a scale to prove that even without air to push against, rockets can still create propellant force. Goddard tried to win over his skeptics by publishing rebuttals in Popular Science magazine and the Associated Press in which he outlined vacuum tests he had performed to verify his claims. But he was still widely mocked. Since he was still so early in the development of rocketry, most of his Experiments fell well short of their intended goal. Far from reaching the moon, his rockets would often explode a few hundred feet in the air. But these tests were incredibly important in understanding the mechanics of his theories in practice. Ultimately, Goddard realized that the only way to achieve his goal of spaceflight was to ignore the critics and just build. So that's what he did. From 1926 to 1941, he launched 35 rockets and reached several important milestones. He repeatedly broke altitude records, all while implementing groundbreaking features like liquid propellant, gyroscopic controls, and multiple thrust chambers. With his dedication finally paying off, Goddard kept setting his sights higher and higher, never taking his eye off the prize of escaping Earth's gravity. He formed critical partnerships with the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and won financing from Harry Guggenheim. But Goddard had changed. The intense criticism he had received in the 20s led him to live a life of secrecy, refraining from publishing his work until every theory had been thoroughly demonstrated. In practice, this hurt his ability to collaborate with other rocket scientists at the time and ultimately slowed the pace of development in the United states. Broadly. Nearly 50 years after the New York Times published their orig criticism of Robert Goddard's ideas, they issued a Correction. It was July 17, 1969, and NASA had just launched Apollo 11 with three American astronauts on board to land on the moon. No one could deny that humanity could escape the Earth with the right technology. And the New York Times had to correct their error. So how exactly did Robert Goddard beat the New York Times? He focused on what was irrefutable. The laws of physics and the rocket science that he had proven both mathematically and experimentally. And that's an incredibly lesson for any entrepreneur working on something new. There will always be skeptics looking to maintain the status quo and refusing to imagine a brighter future. But they must be ignored. Goddard knew this intimately and summed it up best. When a reporter asked him about the New York Times criticism, he said, every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it. Once realized, it becomes commonplace. And that rings true more than ever today. If you like this video, please consider subscribing to the channel. And if you'd like to get in touch with me, just leave me a comment below or reach out to me on tw. Thanks for watching.