He said, “It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England, 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, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.”

He was trying to make a rocket because a airplane couldn’t fly without gravity.  He took apart Chinese fireworks. They were powered by gunpowder, but gunpowder wouldn’t work for the rocket, because the rocket needed a strong steady push to keep it going. Finally he decided to use liquid oxygen and hydrogen. But fuel was hard to get because liquid oxygen had to be stored at -297′ F and hydrogen at -423′ F.

His first successful rocket was 10 1/2 feet tall and weighed 10 pounds. It was launched in 1926. His assistant lit the fuel with a blow torch. It went 41 feet high. The first flight lasted only 2.5 seconds but the space age had begun. He died in 1945 and never sent a rocket to space but but the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the American satellite Explorer in 1958 were descendants of Goddard’s rocket.

Here is how to make a a model liquid fueled rocket:You need :

• An empty wine bottle and cork
• baking soda
• tissue paper
• vinegar

What you do:

1. You take the wine bottle and put a half cup of vinegar in it.
2. Then you take it outside roll up a teaspoon of baking soda in the tissue paper.
3. Drop the packet of baking soda in the bottle and quickly stick in the cork; wait awhile;  the cork will fly through the air.

Submitted by The Swordmaster