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By Root 1258 0

As a compromise he talked about sending a quantity of magnesium flash powder which would make a visible bright flare on the Moon when it landed. This caused a sensation in the press. Goddard was for many years after disparagingly referred to as “the Moon Man,” and he remained rueful about his relations with the press ever after. (An editorial in the New York Times which criticized Goddard for having “forgotten” that a rocket will not work in the vacuum of space because it has nothing to push against may have contributed to his unease. The Times discovered Newton’s third law of motion and retracted its error only in the age of Apollo.) Goddard mused: “From that day, the whole thing was summed up, in the public mind, in the words ‘moon rocket’; and thus it happened that in trying to minimize the sensational side, I had really made more of a stir than if I had discussed transportation to Mars, which would probably have been considered as ridiculous by the press representative and doubtless never mentioned.”

Goddard’s notebooks are not filled with psychological insights. That was not, at least not very much, the spirit of the times in which he lived.* But there is a remark in Goddard’s notebooks that can be only a flash of poignant self-insight: “God pity a one-dream man.” That surely is what Goddard was. He knew great satisfaction in seeing the advances in rocket technology, but it must have been agonizingly slow. There are so many letters from Abbott urging faster progress, and so many responses from Goddard citing practical impediments. Goddard never lived to see the beginning of rocket astronomy and high-altitude meteorology, much less flights to the Moon or planets.

But all these things are happening because of what are very clearly the technological fruits of Goddard’s genius. October 19, 1976, was the 77th Anniversary Day of the Martian vision of Robert H. Goddard. On that day there were two functioning orbiters and two working landers on Mars, the Viking spacecraft whose origins can be traced with utter confidence back to a boy in a cherry tree in a New England autumn in 1899. Among its many other objectives, Viking had the task of checking out the possibility of life on Mars, the prospect that was so powerful a motivation for Goddard so many years before. Curiously, we are still not sure what the Viking biology results mean. Some think that microbial life may have been discovered; others think it unlikely. It is clear that a major program of future exploration of Mars will be required to understand just where in cosmic evolution this neighboring world lies and what its connection is with the state of evolution on our own planet.

From its earliest stages, rocket technology developed because of an interest in life on other worlds. And now that we have landed on Mars, obtained tantalizing and enigmatic biological results, the follow-on missions—roving vehicles and returned sample canisters—in turn require further developments in spacecraft technology, a mutual causality that I think Goddard would have appreciated.

* In a commencement address at Clark University on May 18, 1978, I made some similar remarks. Dorothy Mosakowski in the Rare Book Room at Clark’s Goddard Memorial Library then searched for and found this little essay which had been listed as lost. In it we discover that Goddard was attracted to but cautious about the possibility of life on Mars, certain of the existence of extrasolar planetary systems and deduced “that among these countless planets there are conditions of heat and light equivalent to those we experience; and if this is the case, and the planet is near our age and size, there may very likely exist human beings like ourselves, probably with strange costumes and still stranger manners.” But he also says: “It is for the distant future to answer if we will ever realize truth from our surmises.”

* Although, remarkably, he was in Worcester in the year 1909 when Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung gave the first comprehensive discussion in the English language of those institutionalized insights