Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...next space pioneer was an American. Robert Hutchings Goddard, born in Worcester, Mass, in 1882, was not only a far-sighted theorist but the maker of the first well-engineered space hardware. In 1915, when he was an assistant professor at Clark University in Worcester, he built solid-propellant rockets, and won a $5,000 grant from the Smithsonian Institution. In 1919 the Smithsonian published a brief Goddard report which predicted, among other things, that a multistage rocket weighing only ten tons could land a small payload on the moon...
Suddenly Goddard had a kind of fame. Newspapers featured him, and the New York Times chastised him for the error (it is no error) of believing that a rocket engine can work above the atmosphere without "something better than a vacuum to react against." Goddard, a sensitive man, was appalled by this notoriety...
...bench-testing in secrecy the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Four years later, he made his first flight tests. His tiny, ungainly gadget, launched from a relative's farm near Auburn. Mass., hardly got off the ground, but it was the true precursor of today's mighty rockets. Three years later, an 11-ft. rocket climbed 90 ft. Its noise attracted the local cops and stirred up so much opposition that Goddard left Massachusetts for thinly populated New Mexico. There his rockets climbed higher and higher. In 1935 one reached the sensational height...
Soon after the publication of Goddard's 1919 report, rocket enthusiasts began to clot together in little societies. The science of celestial mechanics (motions of the planets) had been highly developed by the astronomers. The astronauts took it over, added some features of their own. Long before World War II, when no rocket had flown above buzzard altitude, they drew charts of imaginary voyages to Mars or Venus that match almost exactly those drawn today...
...fight free of the earth, the space navigator must reach a speed called escape velocity. Figured at the surface of the earth, this is 25,000 m.p.h. But rockets do not start suddenly. They accelerate gradually, keeping their speed fairly low while still in the atmosphere, then spurting quickly. If a rocket is moving 24,000 m.p.h. when it is 300 miles above the surface, it will escape from the earth's gravitation. When the Russian Lunik launchers, watching their bird with Doppler (speed-measuring) radios, saw it pass the critical speed, they knew it would never return...