Goddard eschewed publicity, because he did not have time to reply to criticism of his work, and his imaginative ideas about space travel were shared only with private groups he trusted. He did, though, publish and talk about the rocket principle and sounding rockets, since these subjects were not too “far out.” In a letter to the Smithsonian, dated March 1920, he discussed: photographing the Moon and planets from rocket-powered fly-by probes, sending messages to distant civilizations on inscribed metal plates, the use of solar energy in space, and the idea of high-velocity ion propulsion. In that same letter, Goddard clearly describes the concept of the ablative heat shield, suggesting the landing apparatus be covered with “layers of a very infusible hard substance with layers of a poor heat conductor between” designed to erode in the same way as the surface of a meteor.[47]
Publicity and Criticism
The publication of Goddard’s document gained him national attention from U.S. newspapers, most of it negative. Although Goddard’s discussion of targeting the moon was only a small part of the work as a whole (eight lines on the next to last page of 69 pages), and was intended as an illustration of the possibilities rather than a declaration of intent, the papers sensationalized his ideas to the point of misrepresentation and ridicule. Even the Smithsonian had to abstain from publicity because of the amount of ridiculous correspondence received from the general public.[21]: 113 David Lasser, who co-founded the American Rocket Society (ARS), wrote in 1931 that Goddard was subjected in the press to the “most violent attacks.”[50]
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 envisaged 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, once it had escaped that attraction.”[51]
On January 13, 1920, the day after its front-page story about Goddard’s rocket, an unsigned New York Times editorial, in a section entitled “Topics of the Times”, scoffed at the proposal. The article, which bore the title “A Severe Strain on Credulity”,[52] began with apparent approval, but soon went on to cast serious doubt:
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even highest, part of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard’s multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising device. Such a rocket, too, might carry self-recording instruments, to be released at the limit of its flight, and conceivable parachutes would bring them safely to the ground. It is not obvious, however, that the instruments would return to the point of departure; indeed, it is obvious that they would not, for parachutes drift exactly as balloons do.[53]
The article pressed further on Goddard’s proposal to launch rockets beyond the atmosphere:
[A]fter the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither 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. … Of course, [Goddard] only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.[54]
Thrust is however possible in a vacuum.[55]
Aftermath
A week after the New York Times editorial, Goddard released a signed statement to the Associated Press, attempting to restore reason to what had become a sensational story:
Too much attention has been concentrated on the proposed flash pow[d]er experiment, and too little on the exploration of the atmosphere. … Whatever interesting possibilities there may be of the method that has been proposed, other than the purpose for which it was intended, no one of them could be undertaken without first exploring the atmosphere.[56]
In 1924, Goddard published an article, “How my speed rocket can propel itself in vacuum”, in Popular Science, in which he explained the physics and gave details of the vacuum experiments he had performed to prove the theory.[57] But, no matter how he tried to explain his results, he was not understood by the majority. After one of Goddard’s experiments in 1929, a local Worcester newspaper carried the mocking headline “Moon rocket misses target by 238,799 1⁄2 miles.”[58]
Though the unimaginative public chuckled at the “moon man,” his groundbreaking paper was read seriously by many rocketeers in America, Europe, and Russia who were stirred to build their own rockets. This work was his most important contribution to the quest to “aim for the stars.”[59]: 50
“A Correction”
Forty-nine years after its editorial mocking Goddard, 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”. The three-paragraph statement summarized its 1920 editorial and concluded:
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.[60]
Some context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard