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| Home > Early Days of Rocket and Aeronautics >MSFC Goddard Rocket Replica Project > Videos > Video Transcripts |
Video TranscriptsOur space program started as a dream, and one of the greatest men who dreamed about it was, Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard. But Dr. Goddard was far more than a dreamer, on the 16th of March 1926, he launched the world’s first liquid fuel rocket. This event in the history of rocketry can only be compared with the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. And all we have seen in the space program ever since, up to the big Saturn V rockets that carried our astronauts to the moon can be traced back directly to Dr. Goddard’s dream and his early pioneering feat at Auburn, Massachusetts. In describing the flight in his notebook, next day, my husband wrote, “It looked almost magical as it rose without any appreciably greater noise or flame. As if to say…I’ve been here long enough. I think I’ll be going somewhere else if you don’t mind. “ None of us who saw this flight had any particular sense of, destiny or very great importance. And yet, this place and that flight would change the course of human history. The giant that slumbered in the liquid propellant rocket had at long last been touched with life. Man was on his way to the moon and the stars. Well, like I said, we kind of were naïve and expecting to find plans. Goddard never had plans in the sense that you would think of today as a set of drawings that you can go and get a copy of, and take it to the shop and build something. He may have had some sketches that he used when he was working with the guys in his shop. But I haven’t found them anywhere, or any reference to them. There is no footage of the launch on March 16th, 1926. Actually, she was taking movies; the film ran out just about the time of ignition, and prior to launch impartial. So there is some movies taken on that day, but they are not of the launch. So from a fabrication standpoint it’s been very challenging, because this stuff is so lightweight, the combustion chamber is only a 32nd of an inch thick. Goddard used a gunpowder and match heads. We didn’t think that was a very good option for us and our safety conscious world. So we thought about why not use a spark plug, that’s how you light the cylinders in your car, with a spark plug.
Successful Combustion Chamber Test No verbiage. This clips shows a Full duration test of Combustion or Thrust chamber of Goddard Rocket Replica at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville Alabama.
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