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In 1899, a boy named Robert Goddard looked up into the sky and dreamed of a mighty machine that could fly to Mars. He remembered that visionary day for the rest of his life as he built his life around it.

In 1919, now a young physics professor, he published what is now recognized as a landmark paper on the physics of space travel. The New York Times ridiculed him for thinking that rockets could work in a vacuum and claimed that he failed to understand even basic Newtonian physics.

So Goddard went quiet and kept working in secret.

And on March 16, 1926 he built a spindly little contraption that flew 41 feet in the air. No newspaper covered it. Nobody beyond his immediate friends, family and colleagues even knew.

It was the world's first liquid fueled rocket.

Since then liquid fueled rockets have become the basis of space travel, just as Goddard had hoped they would. They launched the first satellites, they flew humans to orbit, they took mankind to the Moon, and they took rovers to Mars and space probes all over the Solar System.

Then...



Now...