Humans have thrived to venture; we must always wonder. Our minds are complicated and satisfaction brings joy and a need for more perfection. Completeness is never available in our society, we must soar above what our predecessors have done to satisfy ourselves and those who we precede must do the same. This mindset is what keeps us together as a whole and makes us desire an advance in technology, and as said by those who live an even greater desire of advancement, “When there is a will, there is a way”.

The much sought over venture of flight had to be conquered by our predecessors, as it was they already had a chariot, a bike, a boat, and an automobile, but humans, as demanding as we are, of course needed a faster way to get from place to place, a flying machine. They say the idea of flying had come even before the ideas of an automobile. The desire to fly infiltrated the minds of even the earliest beings; they looked into the sky and wished to express their freedoms as much as those soaring birds. They say that the idea of flight had come from the great philosophers of ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Even the Native Americans could have been the first to think this up as parts of their mythology and some of their rituals express the freedom of flight.

Dr. Robert Goddard, father of modern rocketry, finished his high school education at the age of twenty, not because of failure, but because of his stomach problems holding him back two years in education. During his childhood he showed a fondness for the physical sciences, he in fact was frequently at the library getting books on this matter, and later on graduated high school to be enrolled into Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1904. His Professor, Wilmer Duff, was so impressed with him he was immediately taken in as a laboratory assistant. In 1908 he received his B.S. degree from Worcester and was then enrolled in Clark University later that year. There he received his M.A. and Ph.D. He later accepted a research fellowship in Princeton University. He would work for two years as a teacher at Clark University, and then decide his teacher salary was too modest to fund his rocket research. He started to look about for opportunities that could fund his research; his first was a $5000 grant from the Smithsonian Institute. The first liquid-rocket was launched by Dr. Goddard on March 16, 1926 on a cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts.

After Goddard launched a rocket in 1929 it was published in the newspaper, Charles Lindbergh’s attention was caught while reading about Goddard and Lindbergh decided that flight was the next step in aviation. Lindbergh and Goddard soon met and they were both impressed with each other. Goddard’s rocket launches soon became popular, for every rocket launch there was a news article to follow it. It soon became hard for Goddard to work without unwanted distractions. Lindbergh decided that Goddard needed more money to fund his research so he started putting his famous name to work, and with fame followed fortune. He finally found a great donator out of the Guggenheim family; they in fact donated $100,000 and they would continue to fund Goddard’s research. Goddard would soon relocate to New Mexico, and a Nazi Germany would soon take interest in his rockets for war plans.

Following Goddard’s interest in rocketry would be the great Wernher Van Braun, who had studied the research of Goddard and made his own research based off of his. Braun was a leading figure in the development of rockets in the United States and Nazi Germany. Using Goddard’s journals and research he made the A-4 rocket series, known also as the V-2. After the war Goddard looked at the design of some of the German V-2 rockets and saw that some of his ideas were put into the making of them. Braun claimed that in order to continue his beloved work on rockets he had to work for the Nazis, so he ended up joining them during the war. He had said, “I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time (1937) I was already technical director of the Army Rocket Center at Peenemünde … My refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore, I decided to join. My membership in the party did not involve any political activities … in Spring 1940, one SS-Standartenführer (SS Colonel) Müller … looked me up in my office at Peenemünde and told me that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had sent him with the order to urge me to join the SS. I called immediately on my military superior … Major-General W. Dornberger. He informed me that … if I wanted to continue our mutual work, I had no alternative but to join.” He had started as a second lieutenant and was then promoted three times to become a Wehrmacht major. In the November of 1942, Hitler agreed to the development of the V-2 (”Vergeltungswaffe 2″, “Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2″) to bomb London. It was then launched at England on September 7, 1944 and Braun would later say to the London News that “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet”, he would also describe it as his “darkest day”.

Braun would start working for the U.S. army on July 20th of 1945, because Secretary of State Hull had agreed to his and his teams transfer to the United States. They would work at Fort Bliss, Texas, an army installation just north of El Paso. There they would help work on V-2s that were shipped from Nazi Germany for the American Army. They would also work on designs for rockets to be used in war for the army. In 1950, Van Braun and his team had been moved to Huntsville, Alabama, his permanent residence for the next twenty years. He led the army’s Redstone arsenol team and their findings resulted in the creation of the Redstone Rocket. In 1955 Van Braun was finally accepted as a naturalizes citizen of the United States. Braun signiled the birth of the American Space Program by leading the group who modified the Redstone Rocket into Jupiter-C, which launched the first satalite of the west, Explorer 1 on January31, 1958. The years between 1945 and 1957 were hard on Brauns team as the Soviet Union’s space program was ahead of theirs with several new rocket designs in the Sputnik program as the United States didn’t want to fund for advances in the space technology but instead wanted to keep things as it was. Only in 1957 did America realize how far they were behind in the developing space race when they saw the launch of Sputnik 1 into space. The Navy’s unreliable and failed attempt to build a rocket that could launch a satalite into orbit turned the American government towards Van Braun and his team as the only hope to get ahead in this race. NASA was then established on July 29th of 1958, one day later the 50th Redstone rocket would be launched and soon America would overtake the Soviet Union in the space race with the development of a rocket that would allow first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Von Braun would leave NASA when the Apollo program was truncated, as at that point it was evident that the ideas of NASA and his were different when it came to space craft. He later died from a crash as he had internal bleeding which he did not know of on June 16, 1977.

The begginings of rocketry were produced by men who had a mind set to take failure in as an oppurtunity to make themselves better. They would do anything to finish their goal and once they finished their goal they didn’t stop, but they continued in pursuit of their own happiness, and as part of a life long ambition they continued working on their products untill their deaths. They represent what a true rocket scientist is and how their work ethic must be. They did more for their country than any man can do and they did it in the venture for science. They are the true rocket scientists.