Original rocket man remembered 75 years later

Robert Goddard and Nellie, which thundered into history in 1926

(CNN) -- The man NASA calls the father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard, was met with ridicule when he proposed that man could reach the moon hitched to a rocket.

Yet 75 years ago on March 16, the gifted experimenter took the first crucial step to make the dream a reality. From his Aunt Effie's farm in rural Massachusetts, Goddard sent a rocket named Nellie on a brief, but monumental flight.

The 10-foot-high jumble of metal rods, heavy motor and oxygen fuel tanks became the first successfully launched liquid fuel rocket.

Critics dismissed his notion that rockets could travel in the vacuum of space. Goddard did not possess "the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools," the New York Times said of the college professor.

Undaunted, the engineering genius developed breakthrough rocket technologies in Roswell, New Mexico. He held more than 200 patents when he died in 1945. And a rocket constructed on his principles took the first astronauts to the moon in 1969.

To honor the physicist, NASA in 1959 established the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"Dr. Goddard's first work on rockets made little impression on the scientific community and government leaders," said NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in a statement. "(He) once said every vision is a joke, until the first man accomplishes it."

75th Anniversary of the 1st Liquid Fuel Rocket Launch

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