Robert H. Goddard

In 1915-16 Goddard measured the thrust of commercial powder rockets on a ballistic pendulum and, according to David Stern, found that only about 2% of the fuel's energy went into jet speed; with de Laval-type nozzles he obtained efficiencies of up to 63%. These results, and a test showing that recoil continued in a vacuum, were set out in the Smithsonian's 1919 treatise 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes', which was released to the public in January 1920.

On 16 March 1926 Goddard launched a gasoline and liquid-oxygen rocket from a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts; it rose about 41 feet in roughly 2.5 seconds and came down 184 feet from the launch frame. Damond Benningfield reports that a later launch there, on 17 July 1929, carried a camera, a thermometer and a barometer and climbed about 90 feet before crashing.

Tom Crouch writes that by spring 1935 Goddard, working near Roswell, New Mexico, was concentrating on a gyroscopic control system; a letter he quotes has Goddard telling Clark's president that the latest flight was the best of the whole research. The A-series rocket Goddard sent to the Smithsonian that November was assembled from parts of several surviving rockets, and Goddard wrote that the greatest height reached by these rockets was somewhat over a mile.

After the Smithsonian released his treatise in January 1920, a New York Times editorial of 13 January said Goddard 'seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools'. In a Boston Herald article of 14 January, as Frank Winter reports it, Goddard handed the reporter a copy of the treatise, saying 'That tells the whole story', and added 'In self-defense I have to fight shy of the newspaper men'; Benningfield, citing David Clary's biography, says he paid the editorial no more attention than other coverage. The Times printed a correction on 17 July 1969.

In a 1968 article, adapted for Caltech's Engineering & Science in 1986, Frank Malina, then a Caltech graduate assistant, recalled speaking with Goddard on 28 August 1936 and visiting him at Roswell the next month. He was shown the shop (though no components of the sounding rocket), the launch tower and a 2,000-pound-thrust test stand, but Goddard would give no technical details beyond his published 1936 Smithsonian report; Malina took the impression that Goddard regarded rockets as his private preserve.

This is consistent with the profile's below-midpoint collaboration score, which concerns his dealings with outside parties rather than his close work with a small team. Malina was himself a would-be collaborator recalling the visit some thirty years later, and Benningfield's article says Goddard showed off much of his work on the visit. Collaboration

After the launch of 17 July 1929 brought a police car and an ambulance to the Auburn field, Tom Crouch says Goddard was in effect barred from flying his rockets in the area. On 22 November Charles Lindbergh telephoned him after reading a Popular Science article and they met the next day; Lindbergh brought the work to Harry Guggenheim, who agreed to an initial grant of $50,000. Goddard's rocket work was then based near Roswell, New Mexico, from 1930, a site he chose on a meteorologist's suggestion.

The sequence illustrates the profile's persistence score in that the work continued after the Massachusetts ban, though the funding and the move depended on Lindbergh's and Guggenheim's initiative as much as on Goddard's. Persistence