Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars was a sequel to The War of the Worlds and was immediately commissioned by the Boston Post and serialized following the popular success of Wells’s story.4 Goddard read both of them in succession and, in his “Material for an Autobiography” written in July 1927 and 1933, referred to the influence that the two works had on him, writing that, like The War of the Worlds, “Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars, gripped my imagination tremendously.”5 The novel begins in the period right after Wells’s Martian invasion has been defeated and tells the story of the Earth’s counterattack on the Red Planet. The heroes of the story are “a few dauntless men of science,” including Lord Kelvin and Wilhelm Röntgen, and led by Thomas Edison. Together they invent an electrical antigravity device and use it to develop a spaceship and a handheld disintegrator in order to repel the expected second wave of Martian invaders. A massive fleet of spaceships is built and sent off to Mars—with encounters on the Moon and a Martian asteroid mining colony along the way—where through many battles and thousands of deaths on all sides, the Earth fleet breaches the walls of the famous Martian canals and causes a deluge that lays waste to the Martian civilization. Goddard’s boyhood appreciation for a pulp-fiction tale of interplanetary conquest does not mean that he himself must have harbored such martial ambitions. Nonetheless, while Oberth and Tsiolkovsky both traced their inspirations back to the peaceable tale of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, Goddard traced his back to two stories that integrally linked spaceflight and war—and was, coincidently or not, the only one of the three to have entered into numerous alliances with military patrons to advance his work.
Edison’s Conquest of Mars also included an extensive description of the fund-raising process for the development of Edison’s space fleet, which may have influenced Goddard’s thinking. From the Earth to the Moon also included details of how Verne’s protagonists in the “Baltimore Gun Club” raised the funds required for their massive cannon to launch a projectile at the Moon, but the two descriptions have a significant difference. While the Baltimore Gun Club is described as succeeding through an appeal to intrinsic interest and global goodwill—receiving its funding from individual volunteer contributions from around the world in a manner similar to some of the civic observatories—it is an appeal to the imperative of military defense that raises the funds for Edison. Just as significantly, the funds raised are vastly larger—“twenty-five thousand millions” of dollars.6 For perspective, $25 billion dollars in 1898 was more than twice the national GDP of the United States at the time.7 The United States was the largest contributor to the Martian conquest fleet, providing $2 billion of the total amount, edging out the United Kingdom at $1.5 billion and Germany at $1 billion. With a hundred ships in the Edison fleet, the $250-million cost of each vehicle was roughly equivalent to the $375-million total cost of the Panama Canal, the single most expensive construction project in United States history when completed in 1914.8 The economic message of Edison’s Conquest of Mars was clear: if spaceflight is considered critical to the defense of the nation and the planet, then there is almost no limit to the expenditure on spaceflight that might result. As the precocious young Goddard sat in his cherry tree and imagined the launch of his Mars-bound vehicle less than a year after reading Serviss’s work, it is easy to imagine him thinking about this message as he contemplated obtaining the resources to achieve his dream.
In 1898, however, Goddard’s relationship with the military was still many years off. Although Goddard would eventually draw more funding than any contemporary American researcher in the field of liquid-fuel rocketry, the resources he employed to develop his initial ideas and designs for spaceflight systems were limited to his own efforts, his teaching salary, and the support of his family. Born into a middle-class family in Massachusetts, Goddard, although delayed in his schooling due to concerns over his health, had a supportive environment for his inventive inclinations. His father was an inventor of small machines and supplied enthusiasm and support for Goddard’s technical curiosity, including the provision of a telescope, a microscope, and a subscription to Scientific American.9 Goddard also demonstrated an early entrepreneurial streak, coming up with business schemes in his early teenage years for a new type of soap, artificial diamond manufacturing, and a large-scale frog hatchery. He would ask his father for money to fund these ventures and would write business letters to his tolerant father addressed to “Gentlemen of the Company” and signed “The Manager,” until he graduated from high school in his early twenties. It was in this curious family business context that Goddard, after his cherry-tree vision, began to keep a folder entitled “Aerial Navigation Department” that would come to contain many of his ideas for space travel.10
Goddard began to work seriously on the problem of spaceflight while pursuing his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University, and as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. He worked through the problem and compiled his thoughts in a series of five notebooks from 1906 to 1915. In these notebooks, each with high-minded headings such as “Navigability of Interplanetary Space” and “Undertaken to find a way to learn in detail of the physical characteristics of the neighboring planets,” Goddard worked out the suite of technologies he believed would be required to enable spaceflight and space habitation. One of his early concepts included a series of nested guns firing toward the Earth and propelling the system upward into space, a concept that would lead him to his initial failed attempts at creating a cartridge-based solid-fuel rocket capable of attaining high altitudes. Limited at this point only by the laws of physics and his imagination, his wide-ranging consideration of the problem led him to investigate a multitude of technologies that he believed would be required for space travel. While still a student, he considered concepts for suspended animation, the use of solar energy for in-space transportation, ion propulsion, the production of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel on the Moon, and, of course, liquid-fuel rocketry. He sketched out numerous system designs and performed the initial calculations that provided him with his initial convictions on the most promising paths of technology development. It was in this period, prior to any financing or external resources, that Goddard developed the majority of his ideas and his approach to the problem of spaceflight.
It was also in this period that Goddard articulated his philosophical motivation for his life’s effort to set a course for the stars. In an outline for an article entitled “The Navigation of Interplanetary Space,” written in 1913 at the age of thirty-one while recovering from his first fight with tuberculosis, Goddard described what he considered to be the “economic” argument for spaceflight: “From an economic point of view, the navigation of interplanetary space must be effected to ensure the continuance of the race; and if we feel that evolution has, through the ages, reached its highest point in man, the continuance of life and progress must be the highest end and aim of humanity, and its cessation the greatest possible calamity.”11 To achieve this end he believed humanity would learn to move throughout the solar system, launching from planet to planet, using the hydrogen and oxygen of these planets for fuel and using their metals to build additional devices for travel and habitation. In an unpublished work entitled “The Last Migration,” Goddard described million-year journeys to other star systems with the aid of energy from “atomic disintegration”—the human passengers being transported in stasis, as successive generations or as a granular “protoplasm” of “such a nature as to produce human beings, in time, by evolution.”12 His most striking description of near-term space development is contained in a confidential report to the Smithsonian in 1920, although the concept is discussed in numerous places in his earlier notebooks: “The best location on the moon would be at the north or south pole, with the liquefier in a crater from which the water of crystallization may not have evaporated, and with the power plant on a summit constantly exposed to the sun. Adequate protection should be mad
e against meteors by covering the essential parts of the apparatus with rock.”13 This description of a lunar base—at a polar crater where near-perpetual sunlight can be used for energy and where the cold traps of a permanently shadowed crater have allowed for significant reserves of water-ice—is almost identical to NASA lunar-base concepts almost a century later.14 Prior to conducting any of his rocketry experiments or receiving any funding, Goddard had already developed a vision for a future in space that was as expansive and detailed as that of any of his predecessors—not to mention many of his successors. It was in a conscious attempt to help create that future that Goddard began his first experiments with rockets, drawing first from his own finances and the resources he had at his disposal.
The first external resources that Goddard had for experimentation and development were provided through his position as a professor of physics at Clark University. He had begun his conceptual development of the liquid-fuel rocket in 1909 while at Clark for his doctorate and included the concept in a patent in 1914, when he became an assistant professor at the university. His first experiments, however, were related to his work on a multiple-charge solid-fuel rocket that he believed could reach orbit.15 In 1914, he began to use his own funds—derived from a salary of $1,125 as an assistant professor and $1,500 the following year when he was appointed head of the department—in order to amass a collection of solid-fuel rockets and to initiate static tests to determine the relative efficiency of different fuels and designs.16 During this time, he performed some fifty rocket tests, using Clark’s shop facilities. Using only his salary, he was limited in the work that he could do and relied on graduate student assistants for help, as well as favors from local mechanics and industrial labs. Graduate student labor remained a nontrivial component of his investigations even when he began receiving formal support for his research from external organizations. At least a dozen Clark graduate student theses were related to Goddard’s research on interplanetary flight—including early experimentation with electrical ion-propulsion techniques—although he never revealed to them that spaceflight was the purpose of their projects.17 It was thus his own modest professorial salary, the university’s facilities, and its pool of graduate student labor that enabled Goddard to conduct the first experiments. These experiments confirmed his faith in the potential to develop multiple-charge solid-fuel rockets of greater efficiencies that could reach orbital velocities.
As Goddard began to rack up experimentation costs, he also began to consider alternative sources of funding that might help him develop his rocket. His first thought was the military. As early as July 25, 1914, he tried to interest the navy in his multiple-charge solid-fuel rocket, writing to Josephus Daniels, secretary of the navy, and offering to develop his rocket as a sort of aerial minelayer that would leave continuous flak along its trajectory with each successive charge.18 Daniels and later also the acting secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, responded with interest, especially with regard to the method of wireless control that Goddard indicated could be added to the device. They both invited him to demonstrate his device. But, given that it was not yet developed to any level of demonstration, he let the correspondence expire. He nevertheless kept his dream of military funding very much alive. On October 19, 1915, the “Anniversary Day” of his cherry-tree epiphany, he penned a pronouncement on how he intended to approach the financing of his project: “Have the Navy or Army Department develop it for coast defense etc. provided they will allow research at high altitudes etc. with it, under government control and assisted by foundations, if necessary.”19 Within a year of writing this note and with the help of his department head, he would begin to approach the military in the hope that the increase in hostilities between America and Germany would give him the opportunity to further his spaceflight program.
The standard narrative of Goddard’s emergence from academia into the world of external funding begins with his submission, unsolicited, of the first funding proposal for spaceflight technology development to the Smithsonian Institution in 1916. In fact, however, Goddard’s initial letter to the Smithsonian was motivated by his pursuit of military funding, which was already under way. Arthur Webster, the head of the Clark University Physics Department, was a member of the Naval Consulting Board and a close confidant of Goddard. Although Webster had initially been skeptical of Goddard’s rocketry work, Goddard’s enthusiasm and experimental results convinced him. He was soon eager to present Goddard’s cartridge-based, high-altitude solid-fuel-rocket proposal to the board and began to make the necessary preparations. Goddard’s first letter to the Smithsonian, sent on September 27, 1916, four months before the official break in U.S.-German relations, was prompted by anticipation of this development and therefore placed the potential military applications of his rocket design at the forefront: “This communication I had intended sending a little later, but I feel that it would not be desirable to delay any longer. Incidentally, I think it would be best not to make it public. . . . My reason for writing just now is the following; My device will be capable of propelling masses, such as explosives, for very great distances, and hence would very likely be useful in warfare.”20 Goddard was not, however, contacting the Smithsonian directly in a military context, although he likely had in mind that the submission might assist him in gaining military support. Rather, his sales pitch to the Smithsonian emphasized the scientific applications of the technology: “My other reason is that the device will, I am certain, be of very great importance to pure science, especially to meteorology. . . . In short, the exclusive use of the device for warfare would, I am certain, be a loss to science.”21
With the enthusiasm of Webster seeming to put in motion matters on the military side, Goddard was approaching the Smithsonian so the two sources of support that he envisioned in his 1915 note would be pursued in parallel. He thus asked the Smithsonian if it would consider organizing a committee, either independently or in collaboration with the Naval Board, to evaluate his concept, and, should the committee report favorably, would the Smithsonian “take upon itself the recommending of a fund, sufficiently large to continue the work, either from a society such as the National Geographic Society or from private individuals?”22 He made no mention of spaceflight, although he did indicate that it should be possible to reach an altitude of 232 miles—well above the atmosphere of the Earth.23 Goddard evidently saw the Smithsonian as a potential catalyst for supporting the scientific investigations that high-altitude rocketry would enable and a source of funding that should be pursued in tandem with military support. Events did not proceed exactly as Goddard expected, however. While Webster’s appeal to the Navy Consulting Board generated only tepid interest, within three months of receiving Goddard’s letter, the Smithsonian provided him with his first research grant.
A significant part of the enthusiastic Smithsonian response can be attributed to the engagement and advocacy of Charles Abbot—then the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and later the secretary of the Smithsonian—who would become one of Goddard’s most ardent and long-standing supporters. Although technically a part of the federal government, the Smithsonian and its resources and charter were the result of Smithson’s private bequest in 1835, and its operating structure was more similar to that of a private foundation than a government department.24 Although it enjoyed less flexibility and more modest resources than some of the major private foundations, there was significant scope for individuals within the institution to promote research projects that interested them. Abbot was not only interested but evidently excited by Goddard’s vision. He considered the concept quite plausible and had, in fact, independently discussed a similar idea with the eminent astronomer George Ellery Hale five years earlier.25 Goddard’s proposal thus appealed to Abbot’s personal intrinsic interests. In correspondence with Charles Walcott, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Abbot strongly advocated support for Goddard’s work. He provided the most extensive review of Goddard’s manuscript, on the merits of whic
h the Smithsonian awarded Goddard a grant of $5,000 from the Hodgkins Fund in January 1916.26 It was thus through the private philanthropic legacies of two individuals, James Smithson and Thomas Hodgkins, that Goddard was first granted support. One year later, however, before this first grant had even been fully expended, Goddard—with the assistance of Abbot, the Smithsonian, and the declaration of war against Germany—would secure his second, much larger grant, this time from the military.
For Goddard, the entry of the United States into the First World War was an obvious opportunity, and he wasted no time in fostering military demand for his long-range-rocket technology. With no evident interest emerging from the Naval Consulting Board, Goddard continued to gently remind the Smithsonian of the military utility of his technology. Five days after the congressional declaration of war on April 6, 1917, however, he made a direct appeal:
I feel that if the apparatus for reaching high altitudes, upon which I am working, has any military applications, these should be developed as soon as possible. Such applications may be of considerable value for these reasons:
1. Possibility of long ranges, exceeding that of artillery
The Long Space Age Page 14