Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket
On this day · 16 March 1926
On 16 March 1926, a quiet physicist fired a gasoline-and-oxygen rocket from a snowy field, founding modern rocketry.
It rose just 41 feet and flew for 2.5 seconds before landing in a cabbage patch — yet that brief hop on 16 March 1926 changed the course of the twentieth century. On a snow-covered farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, physicist Robert H. Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket, burning gasoline and liquid oxygen.
Unlike the solid-fuel fireworks that had existed for centuries, liquid propellant could be throttled and controlled — the essential principle behind every later rocket, from V-2s to the Saturn V. Goddard’s spindly craft, nicknamed Nell, travelled about 184 feet downrange at roughly 60 mph.
A shy man stung by earlier press ridicule of his ideas, Goddard kept the test quiet; it didn’t even make the local papers.
NASA later named its Goddard Space Flight Center after the man whose backyard experiment seeded the Space Age.
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