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 The Fathers of Space Travel

Note: The following article was contributed to the field of science journalism and may appear in other sources.


October 2024  (Original Date)

.. making similar references to History will ascertain our next steps in Space Travel.

The Fathers of Space Travel are regarded as a small selection of rocket scientists who are recognized differently depending on the historian.  In this article, the "fathers" were chosen as 1) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 2) Hermann Oberth, 3) Robert H. Goddard, and 4) Wernher von Braun.  It is considered remarkable that these individuals predicted quite accurately how space travel - including travel to the Moon - should occur.  It is thought essential in today's conquest of Space that making similar references to History will ascertain our next steps in Space Travel.

Originally entitled “Fathers of Rocketry” it became apparent these “fathers” did not narrow their thought processes to merely developing rockets intended for missile weaponry nor even as a field of research.  They intended space travel.  

During the 1870s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky believed that

colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human species “with immortality and a carefree existence."  He was inspired by Jules Verne who depicted space travel in the novel “Around the Moon”.

He held that the universe was full of life and that humans need to move into space to advance their material and spiritual development.  He not only conceived of rocket designs, but of space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship into the vacuum of space, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.  He predicted that mankind's expansion into outer space would transform our thinking patterns and even elevate our moral and ethical sense.  He proposed not only venturing into outer space but the establishing of permanent colonies.

Tsiolkovsky believed humanity had to become a space civilization to survive.

Robert Goddard, who spent much of his life developing the liquid-fueled rocket, began his career declaring to send a rocket all the way to the Moon.  To prove the rocket made it to the Moon, it would hit and flash gun powder that could be seen from Earth through a telescope.  He was also inspired by science fiction, in this case H.G. Wells classic “War of the Worlds”.  An episode in Goddard’s boyhood was when he climbed a cherry tree, to cutoff dead limbs, when he suddenly became transfixed by the sky:

”On this day I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn ... and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, ..”  

“I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended. Existence at last seemed very purposive.”

For the rest of his life, he observed October 19 as "Anniversary Day", a private commemoration of the day of his greatest inspiration.

Although Hermann Oberth’s ideas were criticized as utopian, it was probably due to his ideas being in contrast to the war.  Although considered “utopian” at the beginning of 1920, they became a reality four decades later with the launch of Sputnik and Gagarin,  events of the U.S. Apollo program, and landing on the moon in 1969.  It was said

"The rockets were only a means to an end, his goal was space travel."

Oberth made human beings an integral part of his space vision, describing weightless experiments in space, crewed space flight and spacesuits, a space telescope, a space station for Earth observation, interplanetary space travel, and a multiplanetary humanity.

Wernher von Braun was a student of Oberth, so there is no sense in repeating the same principles nurturing a spacefaring society.  His aims were so steadfast to obtain space travel, however, he took multiple risks during the war to get there, including his own life.

With that said and realized, it follows that this work is entitled “The Fathers of Space Travel” and is comprised of events and achievements which progressed space travel surrounding four individuals.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born in Russia and is regarded as the earliest scientist of astronautics who determined that the escape velocity from Earth into orbit was 8 km/s using a multistage rocket fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.  Astonishingly, this is exactly what took place when man went to the Moon, although Tsiolkovsky never built anything such as a rocket, never experimented with a rocket, or even performed any type of lab test regarding spaceflight or propulsion.  He was primarily a theorist and philosopher, but derived the formula for rocket propulsion in 1897, now called the  “Tsiolkovsky rocket equation”:

change in the rocket's speed ( Δ v )
 exhaust velocity of the engine ( v e )
initial ( m 0) and final ( m f ) mass of the rocket

Prior to this, Tsiolkovsky did build a wind tunnel from money out of his own pocket and performed tests on dirigibles and various aerodynamics designs, but it received little attention.  In fact, Tsiolkovsky’s early beginnings were met with hardship.  He went deaf from scarlet fever at the age of nine, and his mother died four years later.  He became recluse and studied on his own.  By age 16, he attended school in Moscow for three years, attending lectures with an ear trumpet, but his father pulled him out after discerning over his condition of being overworked and going hungry.  

After passing a teachers exam, he was assigned a teaching position in Borovsk, married Varvara Sokolovaya, and renewed his interest in science.  His first work was on the kinetic theory of gases (titled Theory of Gases) which was sent to the Russian Physico-Chemical Society.  However they replied these discoveries were already made 25 years earlier.  Nonetheless, he was encouraged by chemist Mendeleev (inventor of the Periodic Table) to continue his research and invited him to become a member of the society.  In 1892, Tsiolkovsky transferred to another teaching post in Kaluga where he remained for the rest of his life.  This led him to develop advances in aircraft design.  He then continued to devote time to astronautics which led to his most serious work “Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices”.  He proposed that to escape Earth, the rocket needs to be made in stages, or a step rocket, continuing to define a rocket train.

The first years of the 20th century were met with another set of hardships.  His son Ignaty commit suicide, and in 1908 a flood from the Oka River overwhelmed his house and destroyed many of his accumulated papers.  In 1911, his daughter Lyubov was arrested for involvement in revolutionary activities.

A crater on the far side of the Moon has the name ‘Tsiolkovsky’.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, however, the new Soviet government took an interest in rocketry and of Tsiolkovsky’s work.   In 1919, he was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the council of the People’s Commissars in 1921 granted him a life long pension for his services in education and aviation.  Tsiolkovsky lived to 78 years and was given a State funeral by the Soviet government.   A crater on the far side of the Moon has the name ‘Tsiolkovsky’.


Konstantin Tsiolkovsky at his study

Hermann Oberth was born in Romania in 1894 and spent most his life in Germany as a physicist and rocket pioneer.  At an early age he was inspired by Jules Verne fiction novel given to him by his mother, "From the Earth to the Moon." He first enrolled in the University of Munich to study medicine, following the footsteps of his father, but his studies were disrupted by World War I which placed him in a medical unit on the battlefield.  Afterwards, he decided his future was not in medicine and returned to the University to study physics. He took an interest in gravitational pull and liquid rockets and realized the importance of multiple stages in rocket travel,

“If there is a small rocket on top of a big one, and if the big one is jettisoned and the small one is ignited, then their speeds are added."

However, when Oberth presented his doctoral thesis on rocketry in 1922, it was rejected.  (They claimed it was too “utopian”).  He turned away from academic pursuits and decided to establish himself independently.  A year later he published his first draft of “The Rocket into Planetary Space”.  A more detailed version of this work appeared in 1929 and it eventually gained him widespread recognition.  Oberth’s first rocket was launched in 1931 in Berlin, Germany, five years after Robert Goddard launched his first liquid-fueled rocket.   The static tests for his rocket were assisted by 18-year old Wernher von Braun.

Oberth married Mathilde Hummel in 1918, with whom he had four children.  One of his sons lost his life as a soldier during World War II, and his daughter Ilse was also killed in World War II but from an accident due to an explosion at a rocket test facility where she worked as a V-2 rocket technician.

Many engineers were inspired by Oberth’s book containing comprehensive theoretical considerations and bold conclusions.  In his book, Oberth stated:

Premise 1: With the current level of science and technology, the construction of
                    machines that can fly higher than the Earth's atmosphere is likely.

Premise 2: With further refinement, these machines can reach such speeds that
                        they do not have to fall back to the Earth's surface and are even able to
                        leave the Earth's sphere of attraction.

Premise 3: Such machines can be built in such a way that people (probably without
                        health problems) can ride up with them.

Premise 4: Under certain economic conditions, the construction of such machines
                        can be worthwhile. Such conditions can occur in a few decades.

Hermann Oberth continued to describe a giant “Space Mirror” (to manipulate weather patterns, today referred to as Climate Change), a “Moon Car” (today called the Lunar Rover), and ion propulsion (2007 Dawn spacecraft).

After Oberth gained widespread recognition he was thought to be a security risk for the secret project located in Peenemünde called Aggregate 4, which was the V-2 rocket program under the direction of Wernher von Braun.  Although history may state that Oberth helped develop the V-2, it has also been stated that he was never directly involved in the V-2 nor of any of von Braun’s work, but instead given the alias name "Friedrich Hann" and placed in patent review for the Army Research Institute Peenemünde.  Later, he was awarded the War Merit Cross (1st Class) for his "outstanding, courageous behavior ... during the attack" on Peenemünde on August 1943.

With the collapse of Nazi Germany and the beginning of the Cold War, he fled to Feucht,  West Germany and later worked as an independent consultant in Switzerland, and then on solid-fuel rockets in Italy in 1950.

From1950 to 1953, Oberth served the Italian Navy, returning to Feucht, Germany to publish his book “Man into Space” in which he described ideas for a space-based reflecting telescopes, space stations, electric-powered spaceships, and space suits.  In 1955 Oberth worked for his former assistant, Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama.  He also prepared a study "The Development of Space Technology in the Next Ten Years".  Oberth returned to Germany and retired in 1962.

Of the first three founding fathers, only Oberth lived long enough to see any of his pioneering visions come true.  On July 1969, Oberth returned to the United States to witness the launch of the Apollo 11 mission powered by the Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first landing mission to the Moon.  He later witnessed the launch of the 22nd Space Shuttle mission in 1985 that carried Spacelab which was funded and directed by West Germany.


Herman Oberth in the foreground with Ernst Stuhlinger (seated left), von Braun (seated right), U.S.
General Holger Toftoy, and Robert Lusser

Hermann Oberth lived to 95 years, dying in Nuremberg, West Germany 1989, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain.  Oberth has several dozen awards and honors, including schools and museums named after him.  A Moon crater, and asteroid were named after Oberth: (9253) Oberth.

The last paragraph of his 1954 book Man into Space addresses the question:

“Why space travel ?”

To this he eloquently and philosophically responds:

“This is the goal:  To make available for life every place where life is possible.  To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful."

 

“This is the goal:  .. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful."

Hermann Oberth with Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1961

 

Robert Goddard, born 1882 in Worcester, Massachusetts, was an American engineer, physicist, and inventor considered the father of modern rocketry and known for his treatise “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes” published in 1919.

After Richard Henry, a second son, died before his first birthday due to a spinal deformity, Robert Goddard became the only child of a bookkeeper and machine shop owner.  The time period was the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution era, and young Robert Goddard felt the excitement while Worcester factories were producing machinery and goods for the burgeoning country.

The key to a working rocket lies in Goddard’s patents, ..

Like the other pioneers of space such as Tsiolkovsky and Oberth, Robert Goddard’s imagination was stirred by science fiction, notably H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds” and dreamed of constructing a working spaceflight machine.

In 1908, Goddard began a long association with Clark University, Worcester where he earned his doctorate, taught physics, and carried out rocket experiments.  He was the first to prove that thrust and consequently propulsion can take place in a vacuum, needing no air to push against.  Goddard was deriving theories and making discoveries about the same time as  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, but neither of these three men knew each other.

He was the first to develop a rocket motor using liquid fuels as used in the German V-2 rocket weapon 15 years later.  He performed a static test of a liquid-propelled rocket in 1925, and on March 16, 1926 on his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, he launched the world’s first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket.

Robert Goddard is credited as the first to create, build, and launch a liquid-fueled rocket.  He was first to have insight that liquid hydrogen in combination with liquid oxygen would make the most efficient propellant, although only liquid oxygen was available since liquid hydrogen was still being invented.  He substituted gasoline instead of hydrogen, and became the first to combine it with liquid oxygen.

He also took an interest in aerodynamics which led him to study the scientific papers of Samuel Langley, and to reading Newton’s Principia Mathematica which he realized the Third Law of Motion applied to motion in space.  He set out to test Newton’s Third Law of Motion in a little brook in back of a barn using devices suspended by rubber bands and devices on floats.  He stated,

“the said law was verified conclusively. It made me realize that if a way to navigate space were to be discovered, or invented, it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics.”

Finding support for his research was not easy.  He was a shy person and rocket research was not considered a suitable pursuit for a physics professor.  However, a letter he wrote reached Charles Abbot of the Smithsonian Institution and his research was modestly financed.  Later, aviator Charles Lindbergh helped him achieve financing through the Guggenheim Fund which allowed him to setup a small shop and crew in the American southwest at Roswell, New Mexico.  Here he became the first to shoot a liquid-fuel rocket faster than the speed of sound (1935) and obtained the first patents for steering apparatus.  He also developed the first pumps for rocket fuels, self-cooling rocket motors, and other components for the engine to carry man into outer space.

It is sometimes remarked that Goddard’s rockets didn’t fly very high and that his landmark test flight of the first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926 (widely published) only ascended 41 feet.  The explanation is that Goddard was setting the precedent for all the important practices of rocketry and that altitude wasn’t a main issue for the moment.  He was modestly funded and had to work with rockets on a smaller scale.  If one recalls correctly, Goddard’s first insight was to send a rocket to the Moon and flash gun powder when it hit, verified by a telescope on Earth.  His sights were certainly set high enough, but he never launched a rocket beyond the atmosphere nor even beyond two miles in altitude.  He often remarked on travel to outer space and to the Moon, but it drew ridicule from those around him, perhaps amplified by the small town setting of Worcester.  This was known to humiliate Goddard and he would quickly withdraw himself from the crowd and seclude himself to work privately.  These incidences may have contributed to Goddard’s approach of taking a low profile to his research, deciding to work on small scale rockets that would not actually go to the Moon, but would contain the ingredients for such an endeavor if ever it were implemented.

If Goddard’s rockets didn’t appear to fly very high it was because he was more involved in verifying the correct workings of important subsystems which include guidance and control, turbo pumps, gyroscopes, the Laval nozzle, multi-staging, correct fuel mixtures, and energy efficiency.

Von Braun said of Goddard,

"His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards [didn’t fly very high], but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles."

and,

 "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible."

Goddard’s work was somehow represented in the V-2 rocket which in 1942 traveled outside the atmosphere and into the reaches of Space at 176 km (109 miles).  When the V-2 was used as a first stage to the WAC Corporal rocket, the altitude increased to 250 miles.  This led to the Jupiter-C which soared upward to 700 miles, and the rest is history.

How Goddard’s work got into the German V-2 remains unknown.  All that history records is that Goddard sent a copy of his book (A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes) one day to Hermann Oberth upon his request.  Afterwards, the two became distant rivals, often accusing each other of stolen work or plagiarism.  But this first elementary book did not outline the critical details of a working rocket.  It mostly discussed ideas and principles.  It would not be surprising that Oberth did something similar on the other side of the world regarding elementary ideas and principles.  The key to a working rocket lies in Goddard’s patents, which numbered to over 200 after his post-death hearings.  There is very little on record that the Germans had this type of backing, or any type of backing at all.  Logically following, since all the developments of the liquid-propellant rocket were extensively documented by Goddard – and nobody else - he is the inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket, V-2 and all.


Robert Goddard at Roswell, New Mexico

During World War II, Goddard offered his services to the military and was able to contract the Navy, which led him to Annapolis, Maryland.  But they were interested in developing jet-assisted-take-off (JATO) instead of high altitude rockets, and full time devotion to rocket science became suspended.

The V-2 made it into American hands during the post-war, perpetuating further developments and causing newer rockets, and a striking similarity was discovered of the inner workings of these rockets compared to Goddard’s designs.  It is suspect the U.S. government usurped Goddard’s patents when he was working for the Navy, and left him out-of-the-picture for reasons of national security.  However, this is considered wrong  without any compensation to the inventor, and so the U.S. had to pay $1 million to Goddard’s heirs for patent infringement.  These series of events, however, may be blamed on the chaos of war and that such errors or violations are reconciled after a war has ended.

The modern rocket of today still use the concepts developed by Goddard which are multi-staging, turbo pumps to mix fuels, gyroscopic control of a Laval nozzle, propulsion in the vacuum of Space, and an effective mixture of liquid oxidizer and fuel.  Goddard was the inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket, the most widely used rocket in practice today.  He also described the concept of the ablative heat shield, where the landing apparatus is covered with "layers of a very infusible hard substance with layers of a poor heat conductor between" designed to erode in the same way as the surface of a meteor.  Ablative heat shields have been used for decades in U.S. rocket programs and shown to be very effective and efficient for surviving reenty into the atmosphere.

He was often vexed with tuberculosis, a disease that killed his mother, but he managed to stay strong and vigilant during the course of his career.  He was eventually diagnosed with throat cancer and passed away in 1945, almost moments after the U.S. became victorious with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  His father also died of throat cancer.  Both were cigar smokers.

      
The first liquid fueled rocket

To work on rockets, von Braun had to join the German army ..

Wernher von Braun possibly demonstrated the most avant-garde career of the century when he worked for more than one side during the war, managed the war itself leading a team of scientists, and then sent man to the Moon.  What caused such a controversial life story but then led to a brilliant career ?  It was partly due to the time era of the world wars and that Von Braun was concerned of fulfilling his career as a leading rocket scientist, and fulfilling a higher principle, perhaps one that was prophesied by the early Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.  It seemed as if Von Braun didn’t care who, what, or where he had to go to fulfill this principle - he would deal with that accordingly.  As a result, he was mostly well-admired and well-liked by either side, although he knew to be on the guard for the political dangers he would confront.  His realism carried him through the war and earned him a place in history.  (He was almost killed twice during World War II).  Like other leading scientists, he was well educated, but not only in math and science.  He knew the arts and music, human social politics and history, and what made the human tick.  He sensed when Nazi Germany was about to lose the war and preplanned his surrender to the Americans.  He chose not to go with the Soviet Union because he believed the Americans would be more receptive to his advanced rocket technology,  which would allow him to continue his work and avoid any harsh treatment from a politically oppressed Soviet Union.

Von Braun was born 1912 in the German Empire to a civil servant and minister of agriculture, Magnus von Braun, and to Emmy von Quistorp.  Wernher had two brothers, Sigismund, and Magnus who also became a rocket scientist.  Wernher von Braun played piano and cello at an early age and took lessons from Paul Hindemith.  He did not do well in math and physics when he first started boarding school but somehow obtained a copy of Hermann Oberth’s By Rocket into Planetary Space and became fascinated with space travel.

Inspired by rocket car demonstrations by Fritz von Opel and Max Valier, von Braun decided to construct his own homebuilt version of a toy wagon with the largest fireworks he could purchase.  When he launched it, it disrupted a crowd of people and young von Braun was arrested and handed over to his father for discipline.  Somehow this incident highlighted his dedication to rocketry and space travel.

In 1930, he joined the spaceflight society Verein für Raumschiffahrt, or VfR as it is often referred to.  The society attracted members such as Hermann Oberth, Willy Ley, Rolf Engel, and Rudolf Nebel, co-founded by Valier.

To work on rockets, von Braun had to join the German army since there was no other way to obtain support for such an undertaking.  This later developed into the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler and von Braun is often accused of associating with an organization that was considered enemy to the rest of the world.  But he first joined the army before it became the Nazi Party, and he was committed to being a career scientist and most likely decided to deal with the complexities of the war as it unfolded.  To keep his job at Peenemunde as Technical Director at the Army Rocket Center, he had to join the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) for fear of losing his job, or even of imprisonment or execution.  He had mixed reactions to his situation once remarking, "to us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache".  Any hostilities inflicted upon the so-called masses during Hitler’s reign were not known to many until well after the war, including von Braun.  Von Braun really only knew that he was hired as a rocket scientist during wartime Germany.

When Nazism fell in 1945, von Braun had to act quickly because Hitler ordered all “technical men” concerned with rocket development to be gassed.  He assembled his team and fled to the mountains in South Germany eventually making it to the advancing American lines in Austria.  Here, von Braun’s brother Magnus (who had a better understanding of English) was instrumental in the surrender to the Americans,  approaching a soldier on bicycle and calling out for their surrender and explaining who is brother was.

Von Braun and his team were then secretly transported to the United States, with von Braun transferred to Fort Bliss, Texas where he taught military personnel the details of rockets and guided missiles, and helped assemble and launch a number of V-2s that were recovered from Allied-occupied Germany.



Wernher and brother Magnus as they surrender to the Americans
during World War II

At the start of the Korean War in 1950, von Braun and his men were then transferred to Huntsville, Alabama where he would remain for the next 20 years.  He became director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency which developed the Jupiter-C, a modified rocket from the Redstone.  It successfully launched the West’s first satellite, Explorer 1 in 1958.  But the Soviets had won the race to space with the Sputnik satellite in 1957, and again in 1961 with the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, who circled the Earth in a Vostok spacecraft.

Von Braun was aware of the progress the Soviets were making and offered to launch a satellite for the U.S. prior to 1957.  But the government declined his offer without realizing the consequences, and the U.S. was trailing the Space Race in more than one way.

Then a bold move took place when in 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced the ambitious goal of sending a man to the Moon.  NASA was established in 1958 and von Braun was transferred to NASA in 1960, and the ABMA became the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center with von Braun its first director.



Wernher von Braun with President John F. Kennedy

While von Braun was testing V-2 rockets in White Sands, New Mexico, Robert Goddard was nearby at Roswell with his own team developing the liquid-fuel rocket motor.  The two never knew each other and it is hard to say if they ever actually met, although they most likely heard of each other.  If Goddard was the inventor of the rocket, then von Braun was the person who applied it.  Goddard The Inventor – von Braun The Engineer.

During their careers, both von Braun and Goddard encountered women spies.  A woman SS spy of Hitler posing as a dentist at a cocktail party reported von Braun when he complained of a  “defeatist” attitude because he wasn’t working on spaceships.  This led to his arrest, and was detained for two weeks, before being later reinstated to work on the V-2 program.  A woman Soviet Union spy who infiltrated the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics got hold of one of Goddard’s reports which he had written for the Navy in 1933.  It contained results of tests and flights and suggestions for military uses of his rockets.

Both Wernher von Braun and Robert Goddard married, von Braun to Maria Luise von Quistorp in 1947 whom he retrieved from Germany with permission while at Fort Bliss.   Goddard married Esther Christine in 1924, a secretary at Clark University.  Von Braun had three children, while Goddard did not have any.  Von Braun became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1955.

Esther often joined Goddard on his test launches and worked a camera, including the historical launch of 1926.  After Robert Goddard’s death in 1945, his wife Esther sorted out his remaining papers and secured 131 additional patents.  While rocket development continued in the United States, it was claimed most of Goddard’s patents were being infringed upon, and a suit was brought to the United States to settle a claim of $1,000,000 for 200 of Goddard’s patents.  In 1959, Goddard was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the country’s highest decoration for civilians.  Von Braun was awarded the National Medal of Science in Engineering just before his death in 1977.



Von Braun poses with a series of post-WWII rockets used in civilian aerospace while at NASA.
These include the Jupiter-C, Saturn-1B, and Saturn V.

The fathers of space travel all seemed to have phrased a similar message that humankind must extend into Space to further grow and develop into what it should be, and that following this wisdom will help their survival.  From a early time, Tsiolkovsky showed a great faith and vision in mankind that could successfully expand beyond Earth and triumphantly colonize space when he wrote,

“The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”







References

1.  Rocket Man – Robert H. Goddard .., D.A. Clary, Hyperion, NY, 2003.

2.  Robert Hutchings Goddard – Pioneer of Rocketry and Space Flight, S.M. Coil, Facts on File Ltd, 1992.

3.  To a Distant Day - The Rocket Pioneers, C. Gainor, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

4.  Wernher von Braun, C. Lampton, Franklin Watts, NY, 1988.

5.  Man Into Space, H. Oberth, Harper & Brothers, 1957.

6.  Nazi Rocketeers – Dreams of Space and Crimes of War, D. Piszkiewicz, Praeger Publishers, Connecticut, 1995.

7.  A To Z of Scientists in Space & Astronomy, D. Todd and J.A. Angelo, Facts on File, Inc., 2005.

8.  Hermann Oberth - Father of Space Travel, H.B. Walters, The Macmillan Company, NY, 1962.  

9.  Dr. Space – The Life of Wernher von Braun, R.J. Ward, Naval Institute Press, 2005.