2. Ease of transportation and of firing
3. No necessity for a fixed position of firing, with the consequent impossibility of the enemy’s locating the firing position.27
Goddard then stressed the need for secrecy in the letter and boldly suggested that he be granted an officer’s commission from the War Department as a ballistics expert “that would make my position sufficiently official to facilitate getting supplies and materials, as well as any information on ordnance that would be necessary during the construction of the apparatus.”28 As for the meteorological work supported by the institution, he felt it should of course be continued, “for such work would have an immediate military application in the attainment of very great ranges.”29 With the onset of war, Goddard had made the scientific applications of his invention subservient to its military applications, even in his discourse with scientists.
Abbot was as enthusiastic as Goddard about the military applications of the technology. He wrote Walcott, who was also the chairman of the influential Military Committee of the National Research Council, expressing his support in strong terms in April 1917:
I believe he would succeed in perfecting means to propel large bombs or shells to distances of say 100 miles from the point of firing. The lateral aim I should think would be good, but the under- or over-shooting of the target quite probable. However if it were desired to destroy the Krupp works at Essen a large number of trials with different probable ranges might probably accomplish it from the French lines by means of Goddard’s invention, provided the Allies were as willing to disregard the rights of noncombatants in Germany as are the Germans to murder noncombatants everywhere.30
He concluded his letter with a recommendation that a War Department grant of up to $50,000 to Goddard was warranted. Walcott, however, was initially less eager to promote the technology and replied to Goddard that “until demonstration has been made that the apparatus can be actually used, there will be very little upon which to base a request for the cooperation of the War Department.”31 Goddard initially showed deference to Walcott on the matter, but he was anxious for a more rapid pace of development. By the end of August, he independently sent a report to the chief of the Army Ordnance Department with the details of his Smithsonian grant and estimates as to the probable weights, payload capacities, ranges, and military applications of his rockets.32 Although this report failed to convince the Ordnance Department to take immediate action, it was Goddard’s independent pursuit of military support in the summer and fall of 1917 that ultimately led to military interest and funding.
Goddard’s first supporter within the military was Halsey Dunwoody, a dynamic individual who would use his position within the recently expanded Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps to advocate for Goddard’s rocketry work. Although Lehman and Clary have downplayed Dunwoody’s role, Goddard’s diary entries make clear that Dunwoody was, in fact, a critical connection leading to Signal Corps support. Dunwoody would later rise to prominence during the war as chief of the Technical Section of the Air Service overseas in Paris and a member of the Interallied Aviation Commission. After the war, he was executive vice president of the Universal Aviation Corporation, where he established one of the first transcontinental train-air-train routes. He would also become vice president of American Airlines during the Second World War.33 In late August 1917, however, he had just received his first commission as a lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps when Goddard paid a visit to him at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was acting professor of natural and experimental philosophy.34
The ambitious Dunwoody immediately grasped the potential of Goddard’s rocket designs. Although he likely did not yet have the formal authority to do so, he offered Goddard $5,000 in support.35 Goddard seems to have been much encouraged by Dunwoody’s enthusiastic response, writing, “I had about decided it was hopeless and thought I would give it to the best-looking man.”36 Dunwoody moved to Washington for his new role with the Signal Corps and resumed correspondence with Goddard in October, prompting Goddard’s first of many trips to Washington on November 11 in search of funding.37 While he met with Dunwoody twice during the visit, he did not meet with any of his contacts at the Smithsonian, and it is not clear if he even alerted them to his presence in the city.38 The following month, Dunwoody visited Goddard at Clark to see his work, an impressive show of support when one considers Dunwoody’s mounting responsibilities at the time.39 By January 1918, Dunwoody seems to have prearranged for $10,000 from the Signal Corps. Goddard traveled to Washington on January 17 to meet with Walcott and Abbot for the first time to help write an official letter and accompanying technical report to Major General George Squier, the chief Signal Corps officer, requesting the funds.40 With Dunwoody’s groundwork and official recommendations of support from Walcott and Samuel Stratton, respectively the chairman and secretary of the National Research Council’s Military Committee, approval was a mere formality.41
While Goddard’s personal pursuit and cultivation of military support had enabled him to secure another grant for his rocket technology, there was a critical enabling factor on the demand side of the equation: the massive increase in military expenditure on aviation in the Signal Corps under General Squier. In July 1917, President Wilson had signed into law the largest individual appropriation for a single purpose in American history up to that point—$640 million for a new military aircraft program under the Signal Corps.42 For comparison, the previous year’s funding for military aeronautics had been $13 million.43 The flood of funding created new opportunities for exchange between technologists and military strategists and an ideal context for Goddard’s bold research proposal. The armaments-expenditure boom of the First World War had resulted in the first military funding for a long-range rocket technology that had been designed by its inventor with the intent of spaceflight.44 Other very similar scenarios—proposals for long-range rocketry for bombardment, amid the rapid and massive increase in military expenditure during the armaments races before, during, and after World War II—would ultimately lead to the funding and successful realization of the spaceflight-capable liquid-fuel-rocket technology in Germany, the Soviet Union, and America.45
Along with new opportunities, however, the First World War funding deluge for aviation technology also created significant management problems. The new aviation production program was soon charged with widespread waste and corruption, with the result being that it was transferred out of the Signal Corps on May 21, 1918.46 In spite of this, Chief Signals Officer Squier, a firm believer that science and engineering were crucial to the nation’s economic and military competitiveness, was able to throw an additional strong line of support to Goddard. Squier authorized, less than a week before the program was moved, an increase of Goddard’s grant to $20,000, allocating an extra $5,000 in August and working to subsequently encourage the support of the Army Ordnance Department.47 Although the situation existed for only a relatively brief period of time, the First World War led to a major increase in American military expenditures and in the demand for advanced military technology—a demand that Goddard leveraged with opportunism and great determination in order to boost his spaceflight development program.
Wartime military budgets also led to Goddard’s first encounters with industry interest in his rockets. In their first meeting, Dunwoody saw the potential for rockets to become big business given the recent increases in military expenditures, commenting, “can’t you see that there’s millions in that thing for you?” 48 Dunwoody suggested that Goddard partner with a manufacturer, since the government did not usually undertake these types of technology development projects in-house. Although Dunwoody offered to help put him in contact with potential partners, Goddard had his own ideas and initiative. He had already been developing a relationship with a major arms manufacturer—Winchester Bennett, president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Goddard had been in touch with Bennett and the Winchester Company for a number of years, with the relationship developing to the po
int at which Bennett provided Goddard with steel for his experiments, free of charge.49 In November 1917, Goddard visited the Winchester plant in New Haven, Connecticut, but was not able to engender a partnership—although Bennett did offer the Winchester firing range for trials.50
With his principal lead turning up cold, Goddard made enquiries with George I. Rockwood, president of Rockwood Sprinkler, a prominent Worcester automatic-fire-suppression-system contractor with $1.6 million in annual revenue.51 Throughout December, Goddard and Rockwood discussed terms, toured each other’s facilities, and developed a “tentative agreement” for the production of Goddard’s rockets for sale to the military.52 The agreement broke down in January 1918 due to disagreements over royalties and other rights. Rockwood, however, continued to see commercial potential in the rockets, and when relations soured between Goddard and his capable foreman Carleton Haigis, Rockwood immediately hired Haigis after Goddard dismissed him. Rockwood then pursued a separate rocket development contract with the assistance of an ambitious Ordnance Department officer, Colonel E. M. Shinkle. This resulted in significant consternation for Goddard and necessitated a formal letter from Walcott to Squier to deal with the situation.53 Although Lehman has claimed that Goddard’s dealings with Rockwood resulted in an aversion to working with private industry, he in fact continued to pursue numerous industry collaborators throughout his career in connection with military contracts—including with Winchester again in 1919–1920.54
The immediate upshot of the Rockwood affair was that, in order to ensure greater secrecy and to improve productivity, Goddard’s project was moved to California, where he could conduct his work at the Pasadena workshop of the Mount Wilson Observatory. The day after Walcott’s letter to Squier, Walcott wrote to Robert Woodward, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which funded the observatory, requesting that the facilities be made available, noting that all expenses would be borne by the government.55 Goddard and his team relocated to Pasadena ten days later, on June 10, 1918. There, in the workshop where the observatory’s famous one-hundred-inch telescope was still being completed, Goddard began pursuing two research projects under the aegis of the Signal Corps—a single-charge, tube-launched device, which would become a forerunner to the bazooka, and his multiple-charge, cartridge-based apparatus for attaining high altitudes, which he believed could scale to a system capable of reaching space.
Although Goddard had initially engaged the military because he believed it was the most likely source of funding for his multiple-charge, high-altitude rocket, the dynamic of this exchange led him to shift his focus. With the Signal Corps looking for rapid results, and with Goddard eager to please his new patrons, Goddard recognized that the simpler, single-charge device was his best chance for quick success. As a result, he was forced to allocate significant time and resources to it. The single-charge device correspondingly made rapid progress while, by the end of the summer, he was lamenting that “the multiple-charge devices have not received as much attention as desirable.”56 Nonetheless, he had assigned his most capable and creative assistant, Clarence Hickman, to the multiple-charge program, and he continued to tout its advances highly despite its more meager progress.57 While Goddard had managed to leverage military resources for the development of his spaceflight technology, military demands had also leveraged Goddard’s eagerness for support and co-opted him into more near-term and prosaic weapons development. The influence of military expectations on Goddard’s resource-allocation decisions during the First World War is an example of the subtle change in objectives that can occur when spaceflight technologists, desirous of increased funding, enter into exchanges with patrons who do not share their intrinsic motivations.
From Goddard’s perspective, the armistice of November 11, 1918, came at a particularly inopportune time. Goddard had worked intensively at Mount Wilson and within two months of arriving had almost expended the entirety of the initial $20,000 grant. On August 17, George Ellery Hale, the master fund-raiser and organizer of astronomical observatories, sent Abbot a note that gives particular insight into Goddard’s approach to project management: “He is an enthusiast, and has been crowding the shop so much (against my advice) that his charges for overtime will be heavy. His funds will surely be exhausted by Sept. 1, and perhaps sooner, as he has a childlike way of forgetting about expenditures.”58 Although the $5,000 supplementary grant from Squier would keep Goddard working at Mount Wilson until the end of October, military enthusiasm for the development phase of the project was coming to a close. Goddard had, however, made strong progress and had impressed the Ordnance Department officers who had visited Pasadena in September to evaluate his devices. Arrangements were made for an official demonstration on November 6—of the single-charge and multiple-charge solid-fuel rockets, as well as of a double-expansion mortar gun he had developed—in front of a collection of Signal Corps, Army Ordnance, Navy Ordnance, and Aircraft Armament officers at the army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. While the multiple-charge device failed, the single-charge tests were successful, generating considerable interest from a number of the officers.59 Captain Purinton of Aircraft Armaments, in particular, was enthusiastic about Goddard’s recoilless rocket guns for aircraft. However, the end of the war, five days later, seemed to put into abeyance any potential demand for Goddard’s rockets that might have been generated by the November 6 demonstration. Captain Purinton’s comments to Goddard captured the sense of postwar institutional change: “Two months ago the thing would have gone through quickly. Saturday they stopped further development work, and planned not to take on new work until Dept. was re-organized.”60 As the war ended, so too did Goddard’s immediate prospect for using military demands to advance his plans for spaceflight technology.
Tellingly, however, Goddard continued his stubborn pursuit of military funding well after the end of the war. His intermittent work from 1920 to 1923 on rocket-propelled depth charges and antiship armor-piercing rockets for the navy at the Indian Head Proving Grounds—work for which he received some $2,000—is fairly well known to scholars of Goddard’s career.61 His encouragement of the potential gas-warfare applications of his rockets deserves particular investigation, however, as it has gone almost entirely unmentioned in previous histories.62 He repeatedly suggested the application of his multiple-charge rocket to gas attack in letters to Abbot and in his reports to the Smithsonian.63 Walcott and Abbot, in turn, encouraged Lieutenant Colonel Amos Fries, chief of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, to contact Goddard, which he did in May 1920.64 Goddard responded immediately, suggesting a single-charge device for near-term gas-attack application and the possibility of a multiple-charge device for reaching ranges in excess of 3,000 yards (2.75 kilometers).65 The two continued to correspond through June, with Goddard further suggesting the possibility of a long-range multiple-charge gas-attack device capable of 13,000 yards (11.8 kilometers).66 In a letter of June 10, there was strong interest from Fries in the multiple-charge device, and he suggested that an officer could be sent to Worcester to discuss the matter with Goddard in detail. He also invited Goddard to visit the Chemical Warfare Service’s Edgewood Arsenal at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.67 Goddard’s diary entry of August 7 indicates there may have been action on the matter: “Had letter from CWS offered $25,000.” 68 It is difficult to know if funding was ever produced, as the Goddard Collection at Clark University contains no financial documents or information related to Goddard’s career other than what is contained in his correspondence and diaries. However, given that Goddard visited Edgewood Arsenal in November, continued to develop and test his multiple-charge rocket device with no other funding source through to January 1921, and wrote up a report for the Chemical Warfare Service in April 1923, it seems possible that some funding may have been provided.69 It is also noteworthy that, in a letter to Goddard in November 1922, Major Adelno Gibson requested a meeting with the inventor, writing that “the Chemical Warfare Service has been working for some time on a rocket for use in c
arrying chemical warfare agents.”70 Goddard’s letters and diary entries, and Esther Goddard’s editorial comments, suggest that there may have been a Chemical Warfare connection with his work for the navy at Indian Head—work that he considered top secret.71 Regardless of whether or not he received funding from the Chemical Warfare Service, it is clear that Goddard actively pursued rocket development for long-range gas warfare well after the horrific effects of gas attacks in the First World War were widely known and not long before international agreement was reached to prohibit their use in the Geneva Protocol, signed in June 1925.72
Goddard’s pursuit of gas-warfare applications for his rockets, as well as his enthusiasm for weapons development during the First World War in general, provide strong evidence that a reevaluation of Goddard’s motivations and objectives for his military research is in order. The list of weapons projects that Goddard pursued during and shortly after the First World War is extensive: rockets for long-range bombardment, portable single-charge rocket launchers, double-expansion mortar guns, recoilless rockets for aircraft, rocket-propelled depth charges, rocket-propelled antiship armor-piercing projectiles, and long-range delivery systems for gas warfare.73 Although Goddard pushed most strongly for developments related to the multiple-charge apparatus that he believed could lead to systems capable of reaching orbit, he also allowed himself to be involved with projects with less-clear relevance to spaceflight. Given his pursuit of these after the war, wartime patriotism can only be part of the answer. He continued to pursue defense-related funding directly and through his patrons throughout the interwar period, although he was not significantly successful in the effort until the armaments buildup prior to the Second World War, when he again worked for the military, this time on work closely related to the liquid-fuel rocket system that he believed would reach orbit. All this suggests that his enthusiasm for military research stemmed to a significant extent from his belief that military support was the most probable source of resources for the near-term development of spaceflight. That Goddard was willing to develop such a wide variety of weapons in pursuit of this support, including a weapon that could inflict gas warfare on victims over ten kilometers away, is sobering evidence of the Faustian bargain that Goddard was willing to make in pursuit of his singular and obsessive dedication to spaceflight.
The Long Space Age Page 15