rockets, and an interesting co-operation...

Between rocket pioneers. I put this together for another forum, but feel I should put it here as well. This is just my own opinion of course; and I don't doubt that even Konstantin Tsolkovsky's (Tsiolovokski [?] I've seen both spellings) had some impact on both Oberth, and Goddard and through them von Braun. As those three pioneers Tsiolovoski (Russian), Goddard (American), and Oberth (German) constantly exchanged friendly letters as soon as each discovered they were all passionate fans of Jules Verne, and that they were all working in the same fields. This went on for about five years before Tsiolovski's demise. Tsiolovoskii, was a provincial school teacher and science fiction writer had published a number of scientific papers on liquid fueled rocketry for both the Tzarist and Soviet governments while never producing a single rocket. His theories could NOT have been produced with the metal/alloys of the time-period.

The Russian theoretician was never taken seriously by his own government(s) during his lifetime, never built a rocket himself, and his designs were never constructed nor tested by anybody else either at the time. Many of his theories were applicable to modern rockets and space travel today, but not then due to material and production limitations.

The German pioneer rocketeer, Oberth (von Bruan's mentor), after interrupting his medical studies to serve as a medic in WW1 returned to university study, but in 1922 Oberth's doctoral thesis on rocketry was rejected (six years after Goddard's first liquid fuel patent for rockets was granted), and never having heard of the Russian pioneer due to the instability in the new Soviet government and lack of scientific papers being published and/or allowed out of the new Soviet, probably because the fledgling Soviet government had more important matters to take care of.

In 1923, he (Oberth) published the 92 page; Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space). This was followed by a longer version (429 pages) in 1929 actually financed by his wealthy wife (instead of the Weimar Republic), which was internationally celebrated as a work of tremendous scientific importance. While the book was being printed Oberth became aware of Robert Goddard who had previously published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" in 1919, which he had never read. A correspondence between the two rocket pioneers sprang up in this time period, and about the same time both Oberth and Goddard also learned of Konstantin Tsiolkovski in what would eventually become the USSR (he had started his work under the Tzarist regime); and that they (Oberth and Goddard) were also working unknowingly in parallel. However while Goddard was a "practical experimenter" in that he built the rockets as well as wrote the papers, his first successful liquid fueled rocket was developed and launched on March 16,1926. Tsiolkovskii was more along the lines of theoretician in that he generally used complex math and Newtonian physics to prove his points and support his theories.

Oberth and von Braun (who had joined him in the late twenties) did attempt to, and actually did construct actual rockets, they were never as successful as Goddard until much later. Tsiolkovski died in 1935, about five years after he, Goddard, and Oberth began their correspondence. I don't doubt that von Braun, Oberth, and Goddard read any and all of Tsiolovskii's papers that were available outside of the Russian and later USSR's borders. I also wonder just how freely any the information passed between the men after Stalin came to power?

Dr. Goddard had spent his last years during WW2, perfecting the "rocket assist" packs for aircraft take off assistance, and the "fine-tuning" the solid fuel mix he had originally designed in WW1 and was later used for the "Bazooka" tube fired shaped charge weapon propellant. All through the fifties von Braun and Mrs. Goddard tried, and eventually successfully sued NASA for restitution on patented infringements while von Braun was working with NASA. This was the largest settlement to a private person to that date, 1960 (one million dollars to the Goddard estate). Werner von Braun fully understood he was using Goddard's guidance systems, gimbaled nozzles, gyroscopically controlled stabilization vanes, pump designs, and fuels combination ratios in the development of his liquid fuel rockets.

Robert Goddard's "firsts" are a lengthy list even in truncated form:

First explored mathematically the practicality of using rocket propulsion to reach high altitudes and even the moon (1912), and published a paper on this.

First proved, by actual static test, that a rocket will work in a vacuum, that it needs no air to push against. (1919)

First developed and flew a liquid fuel rocket (March 16,1926).

First shot a scientific payload (barometer and camera) in a rocket flight (1929, Auburn, Massachusetts).

First used vanes in the rocket motor blast for guidance (1932, New Mexico).

First developed gyro control apparatus for rocket flight (1932, New Mexico).

First received U.S. patent in idea of multi-stage rocket (1914).

First developed pumps suitable for rocket liquid fuels (1937).

First launched successfully a rocket with a liquid fueled motor pivoted on gimbals under the influence of a gyro mechanism (1937).

Not too shabby for a guy people tend to ignore these days, and don’t make the connection to NASA’s Goddard Space Center for some reason.

Hope that clears up my admiration for Goddard, and also my respect for von Braun when he fought to get Goddard recognized by NASA and the US government in that patent suit.

 

Mr Clean....

Good stuff, makes me think of the movie October Sky. Great film by the way. Kudos to Von Braun for trying to recognize Goddard for his accomplishments. Thank you for sharing.

 

My co-workers at Goddard thank you! BTW, the center is celebrating 50 years of success in space flight!

NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center 50th Anniversary

 

Tex,

Just read the article celebrating Goddard's 50 year mark.... amazing! Look forward to the upcoming missions. If the opportunity ever came to journey into space.... I would be one of the first applicants. Unfortunately, I don't believe my checkbook could handle the ticket price. Oh well, It's fun to think so anyway.

 

My thanks also, interesting read, nice thread post.

 

From Wikipedia:

This little embarrassing side story for the NYT needs to be repeated here:

"In 1919, the Smithsonian Institution published Goddard's groundbreaking work, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. The report describes Goddard's mathematical theories of rocket flight, his experiments with solid-fuel rockets, and the possibilities he saw of exploring the earth's atmosphere and beyond. Along with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's earlier work, The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices (1903), Goddard's little book is regarded as one of the pioneering works of the science of rocketry. It was distributed worldwide and is believed to have influenced the work of subsequent pioneers such as Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun in Germany and Sergey Korolev in the USSR.

...
On January 12, 1920 a front-page story in The New York Times, "Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon," reported a Smithsonian press release about a "multiple charge high efficiency rocket." The chief application seen was "the possibility of sending recording apparatus to moderate and extreme altitudes within the earth's atmosphere," the advantage over balloon-carried instruments being ease of recovery since "the new rocket apparatus would go straight up and come straight down." But it also mentioned a proposal "to [send] to the dark part of the new moon a sufficiently large amount of the most brilliant flash powder which, in being ignited on impact, would be plainly visible in a powerful telescope. This would be the only way of proving that the rocket had really left the attraction of the earth as the apparatus would never come back."[16]
The next day, an unsigned New York Times editorial delighted in heaping scorn on the proposal. The writer attacked the instrumentation application by questioning whether "the instruments would return to the point of departure... for parachutes drift just as balloons do. And the rocket, or what was left of it after the last explosion, would need to be aimed with amazing skill, and in a dead calm, to fall on the spot whence it started. But that is a slight inconvenience...though it might be serious enough from the [standpoint] of the always innocent bystander...a few thousand yards from the firing line."[17] The full weight of scorn, however, was reserved for the lunar proposal: "after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey it will neither be accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that." It expressed disbelief that Professor Goddard actually "does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react" and even talked of "such things as intentional mistakes or oversights." Goddard, the Times declared, apparently suggesting bad faith, "only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."[17] (Forty-nine years later, on July 17, 1969, the day after the launch of Apollo 11, The New York Times published a short item under the headline "A Correction", summarizing its 1920 editorial mocking Goddard, and concluding: "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.")


49 years for a retraction!

 

Well, at least they didn't wait centuries, a'la the Vatican and Galileo!

 

Lol!