Free Strange Angel by George Pendle

technology,” he wrote. His farsightedness was made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was being held prisoner in the Petrapavloskaya Fortress in St. Petersburg, awaiting execution for creating the bombs that had been used in the assassination of Emperor Alexander II. “I believe in the reality of my idea,” Kibalchich wrote, “and this belief supports me in my terrible situation.”
    It was not until 1903, however, that the greatest step towards treating rocketry as a science was taken. Another Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an impoverished, deaf schoolteacher, inspired by the stories of Jules Verne, published his classic treatise
The Probing of Space by Means of Jet Devices.
Developed through a series of experiments made in his home laboratory, his theoretical groundwork dealt for the first time with such complex problems as escape velocities from the earth’s gravitational field and the relationship between the mass of the rocket and its propellant. Although this impressed a small clique of physicists in St. Petersburg, his work would remain little known outside his native country until the 1930s.
    America had its own rocketry pioneer, Robert Goddard. Born in 1882 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Goddard was the son of a bookkeeper and a disinherited merchant’s daughter. He was nurtured in his youth on the stories of H. G. Wells, in particular his novel of a Martian invasion of earth,
The War of the Worlds.
The tale of Martians traveling over 140,000,000 miles through outer space impressed him immensely, as did Wells’ “compelling realism” in the telling of the story. Then, on October 19, 1899, while climbing a cherry tree at his Massachusetts home, he experienced a scientific awakening on a par with a religious epiphany: “As I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the
possibility
of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.” In front of him seemed to materialize a mechanical device, as solid as the tree he sat in, that whirled round and round until it began to lift, twirling and spinning above the city of Worcester and out into space. “I was a different boy, when I descended the tree from when I ascended,” he wrote; “existence at last seemed very purposive.” Since that tumultuous day he had gone on to devote the rest of his life to what he saw as “the most fascinating problem in existence,” rockets and space travel, or, as he grew to call it, “high altitude research.”
    Operating largely by himself while teaching physics at Clark University, he experimented extensively with his own black powder devices, before publishing in 1919 the founding text of modern rocketry,
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.
Among much dry description of his earthbound experiments, he hypothesized that a rocket could be used to attain sufficient velocity to escape from the earth’s atmosphere. Its success could be demonstrated by crashing the rocket onto the moon with a payload of flash powder which would signal its arrival to watching astronomers.
    Goddard wrote his text to gain funding for more experiments from the Smithsonian Institution, and he included the moon rocket hypothesis purely as an illustration of his more abstruse calculations. However, when it fell into the hands of the newspapers, it created a sensation. AIM TO REACH MOON WITH NEW ROCKET , read a headline from the
New York Times,
MODERN JULES VERNE INVENTS ROCKET TO REACH MOON, read the
Boston American.
For a brief moment the rocket took over the nation’s fancy. Goddard began to be called the “moon-rocket man.” Novelty songs such as “Oh, They’re Going to Shoot a Rocket to the Moon, Love!” were written about him. He was mocked and attacked in science journals for his idea. The
New York Times,
in a woefully misinformed