Travel in Time with Dan — Episode 50: A Fictional Interview with Robert Goddard, the Father of Modern Rocketry
Travel in Time with Dan | Pakachoag Farm, Auburn, Massachusetts
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945) was a real American physicist, engineer, and inventor widely regarded as the father of modern rocketry. On March 16, 1926, at his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts — the land that is today the Pakachoag Golf Course — he launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. This imagined conversation takes place in the moments immediately following that launch. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by his documented writings, beliefs, and personality.
📍 Setting: Pakachoag Farm, Auburn, Massachusetts — March 16, 1926. Late afternoon. The field is cold, the snow still settling where the rocket landed 184 feet away. A thin man in a heavy coat is crouching over his notebook, writing quickly, as though the numbers might escape him if he doesn’t get them down immediately. His hands are trembling slightly — whether from the cold or from something else entirely, it is impossible to say.
Dan: Dr. Goddard. I know you’re in the middle of recording your notes, and I apologize for interrupting. But I just watched what happened here, and I have to ask: what are you feeling right now?
Goddard: (not looking up from the notebook for a moment, then finally raising his eyes)
Relieved, mostly. (Small, controlled smile) People imagine scientists feel triumph at moments like this. What I feel is relief. The mathematics said it would work. It is always a relief when the mathematics is right.
Dan: It flew for 2.5 seconds. Forty-one feet high. One hundred and eighty-four feet from where we’re standing. By any measure most people would use, that is a very small flight.
Goddard: (quietly, with complete certainty)
It is the most important flight in the history of human transportation. (Beat) I recognize how that sounds. I am accustomed to how it sounds.
Dan: Help me understand why. What did we just actually witness here?
Goddard: (Standing, tucking the notebook under his arm, looking out at the snow-covered field)
Every rocket in existence uses gunpowder. Solid fuel. It burns fast, it burns uncontrolled, and the energy it produces is limited by the chemistry of the powder itself. For two hundred years, that is where rocketry stopped. It reached a ceiling and no one seriously asked whether the ceiling could be moved.
What we just proved… what that flight just proved… is that a liquid-fueled rocket is possible. Gasoline and liquid oxygen, combusting in a controlled chamber, producing thrust. The fuel is more powerful, it is controllable, and its principles can be scaled. (Turning to look directly)
That is not a small thing. That is the removal of a ceiling that has existed for two centuries.
Dan: Where does that ceiling go, in your estimation? If liquid fuel is the key… how high does this actually reach?
Goddard: (A pause, choosing his words with the care of a man who has learned to be careful)
I have written, in my more private notebooks, about the possibility of reaching the moon. About sending instruments, eventually people, beyond the atmosphere of this earth entirely. (Steadily) I believe Mars is within the theoretical reach of the principles demonstrated here today.
Dan: You know what people call you when you say things like that.
Goddard: (Dry, without bitterness)
“Crazy Bob.” Yes. I am aware. The town has not been subtle about it. (A glance toward the farmhouse) My aunt has been remarkably patient with me.
Dan: The New York Times has been critical. The scientific establishment has been skeptical. The government has shown very little interest. Does that wear on you?
Goddard: (A long pause)
I will tell you something honestly. Early in my career, the criticism was harder to carry. I am a private man by nature, and public mockery does not sit easily with me. But I made a decision… I cannot tell you exactly when… that I would judge the work by different standards than the ones the critics were using.
They were looking at what the rocket did today. Forty-one feet. Two and a half seconds. By their measure, that is almost nothing. By my measure, today I proved that the concept functions. That is everything. Those are not the same scoreboard, and once I understood that, their scoreboard stopped mattering to me.
Dan: That is a remarkable act of mental discipline.
Goddard: It is a necessary one. If I had allowed myself to be governed by external measures of success, I would have stopped working years ago. The mail would have done it. (Quietly wry) I receive a great deal of discouraging mail.
Dan: You’ve spent years fundraising for this work, writing grant proposals, convincing skeptics. What keeps the momentum going when the results are still small, and the critics are still loud?
Goddard: You identify the intermediate proof. You break the enormous vision into the specific thing that must be demonstrated next, and you focus entirely on that demonstration. I did not come here today to reach the moon. I came here today to prove that liquid fuel produces sufficient thrust to achieve flight. (Gesturing at the field) It does. That is today’s success. Tomorrow’s success is different, and I will identify it tomorrow.
A leader… and I think of the scientist as a kind of leader, leading an idea forward through time… cannot sustain momentum by keeping the final destination always in front of them. The destination is too far. The intermediate proof is what keeps you moving.
Dan: Let’s talk about something harder. The U.S. government has largely ignored your work. History may show that was a significant mistake. Other nations were paying closer attention to your research than Washington was.
Goddard: (Carefully)
I am aware that my published papers are read more enthusiastically in certain places abroad than they are here. I cannot control what others do with scientific principles that are, by their nature, available to anyone who reads carefully. (A pause) I will say this: it would be better for this country if the people responsible for its defense understood what liquid-fueled rocketry will eventually make possible. That understanding does not yet exist at the levels where it matters.
Dan: And if it doesn’t develop?
Goddard: Then someday, someone else will arrive at destinations we could have reached first, using principles developed here, on this farm, on this afternoon. That would be an unfortunate outcome. I hope it can be avoided. I am not optimistic.
(He looks back toward the field, toward the small crater in the snow where the rocket came down.)
I can build the rocket. I cannot build the institutional will to pay attention to it. Those are two different problems, and I only know how to solve one of them.
Dan: Last question, Dr. Goddard. People will someday stand on this ground… it may look very different by then… and try to understand what happened here today. What do you want them to know?
Goddard: (Quietly, without theatrics)
I want them to know that on this afternoon, in this cold field, a concept moved from theory to fact. Not from the ground to the moon, but from theory to fact. And that is always where the journey actually begins.
The distance from an idea to its proof is longer and harder and lonelier than anyone outside the work can fully appreciate. What happened here today was not spectacular. It was not impressive by the standards people usually apply to great moments. But it was real, and it was right, and it was the first step in a sequence that has no visible ending.
(A beat)
That is enough. For today, that is entirely enough.
I stood in that cold field for a long time after Dr. Goddard returned to his notes. The snow was undisturbed except for the small mark where the rocket had come down. Nothing about the landscape suggested that anything extraordinary had just occurred.
But it had.
Two and a half seconds. Forty-one feet. One hundred and eighty-four feet from launch to landing.
And from that landing point, eventually: the moon.
The leadership lesson Goddard lived… without ever articulating it as a lesson… is this: redefine success to sustain momentum. Don’t measure today’s flight against the final destination. Measure it against the specific proof you came here to demonstrate. When you do that, a 41-foot flight isn’t a failure that fell short of the stars. It’s a complete and total success. It’s the exact success it needed to be.
Elon Musk is using the same liquid-fuel technology today. The Auburn High School teams are called the Rockets. The New York Times eventually apologized.
Crazy Bob got the last laugh.
And it all started here, in the snow, on a quiet farm in Massachusetts, 100 years ago. 🚀
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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