Second Time Around: What Argentina’s Second Default Means for Investors
31 July, 2014Middle East Capital Markets Come of Age
1 August, 2014Discovery Channel Magazine, August 2014
The all-American boy who faced expulsion for nearly blowing up his school. The Russian who spent years in Stalin’s gulags before emerging to spearhead the Soviet space effort. And the Nazi who turned his attentions from raining bombs down on civilians to putting Americans on the moon. They are the rocket men, and their stories, while so remarkably different, are all intertwined with one another.
Our story starts with the earliest of them: Robert Goddard, remembered today as the father of modern rocket propulsion. He wasn’t the first to come up with the theories of rocketry – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was proposing the idea of liquid-fuelled rockets before the Soviet Union, which would eventually launch them, even existed – but Goddard was the first to send such a rocket aloft. NASA writes today: “The flight of Goddard’s rocket on March 16, 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts, was as significant to history as that of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.”
For any genius, there is a spark that gets them going; for Goddard, there were two. The first, when he was five, came when his father showed him how to generate static electricity on the family carpet. And the second was a daydream when he was 17, when he climbed a cherry tree to lop its boughs and was captivated by the sky.
