Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [123]
When you descend from the cherry tree you know that you are a very different boy from the one who climbed it. Your life’s work is clearly set out for you, and for the next forty-five years your dedication never wavers. You have been smitten by the vision of flight to the planets. You are deeply moved and quietly awed by the vision in the cherry tree. The next year, on the anniversary of that vision, you climb the tree again to savor the joy and meaning of the experience; and forever after you make a point in your diary of calling the anniversary of that experience “Anniversary Day”—every October 19 until your death in the middle 1940s, by which time your theoretical insights and practical innovations have solved essentially all technological impediments to interplanetary flight.
Four years after your death a WAC Corporal mounted on the nose of a V-2 is successfully fired to an altitude of 250 miles, for all practical purposes to the threshold of space. All essential design elements of the WAC Corporal and the V-2, and the very concept of the multiple staging of rockets, have been worked out by you. A quarter of a century later, unmanned space vehicles will have been launched to all the planets known to ancient man; a dozen men will have set foot on the Moon; and two exquisitely miniaturized spacecraft named Viking will be on their way to Mars to attempt the first search for life on that planet.
ROBERT H. GODDARD never questioned or equivocated on the resolve he made in the cherry tree on the farm of his great-aunt Czarina in Worcester, Massachusetts. While there were others who had comparable visions—notably Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky in Russia—Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. He was for many years professor of physics and chairman of the physics department at Clark University in his hometown of Worcester.
In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were, and how influential speculative ideas—even erroneous ones—can be on the shaping of the future. In the few years surrounding the turn of the century, Goddard’s interests were profoundly influenced by the idea of life on other worlds. He was intrigued by the claims of W. H. Pickering, of the Harvard College Observatory, that the Moon has a perceptible atmosphere, active volcanism, variable frost patches, and even changing dark markings, which Pickering interpreted variously as the growth of vegetation or even as the migration of enormous insects across the floor of the crater Eratosthenes. Goddard was captivated by the science fiction of H. G. Wells and Garrett P. Serviss, particularly the latter’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars, which, Goddard reported, “gripped my imagination tremendously.” He attended and enjoyed lectures by Percival Lowell, who was an eloquent advocate of the proposition that intelligent beings inhabit the planet Mars. And yet, through all of this, while his imagination was intensely stimulated, Goddard managed to retain a sense of skepticism very rare in young people given to interplanetary epiphanies high up in cherry trees: “The actual conditions may be entirely different … from those which