On April 19, 1932, Robert Goddard led his students and staff out into the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, to launch a rocket. This was nothing unusual. Goddard had been launching liquid-fueled rockets for two decades. He had a Ford Model A truck with a homemade trailer to haul those rockets to the launch site.
What made today’s rocket special was it was the first to use a gyroscope. The gyroscope allowed the rocket to be aimed. Dr. Goddard built the rockets in his garage. He called this new model the A-4. It blew up eight seconds into the flight, but Goddard decided the gyroscope worked.
Goddard would build more A-4 rockets, eventually flying almost four miles high. He publicly speculated that humans would travel into space and to the moon and maybe even to Mars. Most Americans considered him a quack.
But, across the Atlantic, in Nazi Germany they were taking Dr. Goddard’s work very seriously. The Nazis had their own rocket program led by Dr. Wernher Von Braun. Hitler loved Von Braun and poured millions of marks into his program.
Von Braun and his team built a rocket initially called the A-4. The name was changed to V-2, the V stood for “Vengeance Weapon.” The Germans built five-thousand V-2 rockets at Pennemunde in northern Germany. Most of those were launched at London, randomly killing innocent women and children.
After the war, we sent teams into Nazi Germany to collect important scientists. So did the Russians. We won the race to collect Von Braun and his team by one day. We then smuggled them all into the United States and put the former Nazis to work building rockets for us.
Von Braun became the head of NASA and literally built the rocket that took us to the moon. In the ’50s, Wernher Von Braun was a regular on Disney. He talked about traveling to space and to the moon, and maybe even to Mars. There was some controversy during the ’60s when it was revealed that Von Braun had been a Nazi and a member of the SS. But, by then we were in a Space Race with the dreaded Soviets.
Today, we find ourselves in a new space race between billionaires competing to rule space tourism. Within a generation, humans will vacation on the moon. It will be a favorite destination for newlyweds seeking the ultimate wedding pictures and give new meaning to the term “honeymoon.”
Elon Musk is the face of this new space race. He often talks about sending humans to space and to the moon and even to Mars. If he gets us to Mars, and many people think he will, the rocket that takes us there won’t be all that much different than the liquid-fueled rockets that Goddard invented and launched in the desert, just bigger.
Scott A. Grant is a local historian and author and a frequent contributor to The Recorder. By day, he is chief investment officer at Standfast Asset Management.
