Word: astronaut
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...contains a couple of errors. You say Professor Robert Hutchings Goddard (see cut) is "no astronaut." TIME'S reporter evidently has not read Goddard's classical paper on rockets, A Method of Reaching Extreme, Altitudes, published' in 1919 by the Smithsonian Institution. This is the monograph that reopened rocket experimentation, and really started the modern era of rocket research. In it Goddard not only showed how to reach "high altitudes" theoretically, but also gave considerable space to ways of reaching the moon, and gave the results of some experiments he had made to send some flash powder...
Thus Goddard was not only an "astronaut," as you call them, but actually started the whole modern cycle of astronautics. He is the spiritual father of the whole German and French discussion along these lines in the '205 and '305, though Ley gives him scant treatment in his book...
...M.P.S. Astronauts actually talk like that in fairly low voices, without breathing hard. The fact that no astronaut has yet succeeded in shooting a rocket more than two miles up does not shake their faith. They have learned something of what they are up against and have turned their studies to practical engineering details. Some of the problems are clearly posed in a new book (Rockets; Viking; $3.50) by Willy Ley, onetime colleague of German Professor Hermann Oberth, reported inventor of the robot bomb (TIME, July...
...M.P.H. If any living U.S. rocketeer ever shoots a rocket into outer space, it is most likely to be bald Professor Robert Hutchings Goddard of Clark University (TIME, March 2, 1936), who has been making rockets since 1907. No astronaut, Professor Goddard has restricted his aim to relatively low altitudes. He was the first to shoot a liquid-fueled rocket (in 1923), and at last account had fired one nearly a mile and a half high, at 700 m.p.h. Because he has published little on his findings and has experimented mostly in the privacy of a New Mexican desert, fellow...