Free Strange Angel by George Pendle Page A

editorial, chastised the professor for not knowing the “relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” (The writer of this editorial failed to understand the critical third law of motion, the one even the twelve-year-old Parsons had grasped: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The fact that the reaction takes place in a vacuum is irrelevant.)
    For the shy and retiring Goddard, this was too much. He became more secretive and hostile to enquiries. His rockery work progressed, but he would not share his hard-won secrets even with his admirers. In 1930, at the age of forty-eight, he suffered the added humiliation of being forced to move his home from Massachusetts, to Roswell, New Mexico, after the sound of one of his rocket experiments was reported to the police as a plane crash. Like a prophet he retreated into the wilderness. His life became a cautionary tale of the scorn the study of rocketry could command.
    Along with Hermann Oberth of Romania, who wrote
The Rocket into Interplanetary Space
in 1923, Tsiolkovsky and Goddard gave mathematical form to space flight for the very first time, though none of them knew of each other’s work. Tsiolkovsky dealt with the fundamental laws of motion in space, Goddard made calculations on the amount of solid propellant needed to power a rocket, while Oberth suggested liquid fuels as a means of propulsion and considered the hitherto unexamined problems of space suits, space walks, and the minutiae of embarking on long distance interplanetary journeys. They would be the forefathers of the field that would become known as
astronautics
—the science and technology of space flight—a term, needless to say, that was invented by a science fiction writer in 1927.
    The work of these three pioneers was the theoretical catalyst for the rocket societies that had begun to flourish worldwide in the late 1920s and 1930s, generating tiny pockets of feverish enthusiasts enraptured by this strange science in Argentina, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and Japan. While these societies were considered little more than a joke by the popular media and beneath contempt by the academic community, they paid close attention to each other and to what the other members of their far-flung community were achieving.
    On the evening of April 4, 1930, one such group of eleven space-minded men and one woman met for the first time in a small brownstone building in New York City. They ambitiously called themselves the American Interplanetary Society (AIS) and unashamedly stated their ambitions to promote “interest in and experimentation toward interplanetary expeditions and travel.” They would become one of the few guiding lights in these dark days of rocketry research, making contact with other international rocket groups and expanding into a society of great renown by the 1960s. Their beginnings, however, were modest at best. The group had come together largely because nine of them were science fiction writers, editors, or rewrite men for Hugo Gernsback’s latest science fiction magazine,
Science Wonder Stories.
They included the bearish Edward G. Pendray, a
New York Herald Tribune
reporter who wrote for Gernsback under a pseudonym; his wife Leatrice, a nationally syndicated woman’s page columnist; Warren Fitzgerald, head of The Scienceers, a multiracial science fiction fan club based in Harlem; and Dr. William Lemkin, a chemist and the only Ph.D. among the group. Gernsback himself joined the society but did not attend meetings, preferring to skim through the minutes in order to garner story ideas for the next edition of his magazine.
    The society had an infectious optimism and naïveté. “It was our expectation,” remembered Pendray, “that engineers and scientists