Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket
A physics professor's homemade rocket flies for 2.5 seconds over a cabbage field
Quick facts
- Location
- Auburn, Massachusetts
- Fuel
- Gasoline and liquid oxygen
- Flight height
- 41 feet (12.5 m)
- Flight duration
- 2.5 seconds
What happened
On 16 March 1926, Robert H. Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University, launched the world's first liquid-propellant rocket from his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket, later nicknamed Nell, burned gasoline and liquid oxygen. It climbed 41 feet in the air during a flight that lasted 2.5 seconds, then came down 184 feet away in a cabbage field. Goddard's wife Esther and a couple of assistants from Clark were the only witnesses. The rocket itself was unimpressive to look at: a combustion chamber and nozzle mounted on top of the fuel tanks, the reverse of a modern rocket's layout. Goddard had already spent years working on solid-fuel designs and had published a 1919 paper, 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,' that proposed liquid propellants as the way to reach real altitude, a claim newspapers mocked at the time.
Why it matters
Every liquid-fueled rocket that followed, German, Soviet, or American, descends conceptually from this flight. Goddard's patents and papers gave later engineers, including the Peenemunde team that built the V-2, a body of American work to study and build past. NASA named its first major spaceflight center after him in 1959.
How we know
The National Air and Space Museum holds Goddard's 1926 rocket components and his personal papers; the launch is documented in NASA's own history office account and corroborated by Goddard's own notebooks from the period.
Sources
- NASA History Office. 95 Years Ago: Goddard's First Liquid-Fueled Rocket · Primary source (author-declared)nasa.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Robert Goddard and the First Liquid-Propellant Rocket · Primary source (author-declared)airandspace.si.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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