The Long Space Age by Alexander MacDonald

Author:Alexander MacDonald [MacDonald, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Sources: Goddard, R., The Papers of Robert Goddard, vol. 1 (New York, 1970); see text of chapter 3 for specific source references. PWC-ratio equivalent value and GDP-ratio equivalent value calculations done using measuringworth.com.

The extent of the private philanthropic support that Goddard drew upon is quite impressive. No less than five separate bequests provided him with funding: those of James Smithson, Thomas Hodgkins, Frederick Cottrell, Andrew Carnegie, and Daniel Guggenheim. None of these mostly deceased philanthropists had been personally interested in spaceflight technology. Even Daniel Guggenheim, who provided the funds while still alive, was motivated to do so principally out of the interest of his son Harry and the persuasion of Charles Lindbergh. This underscores the critical importance of well-connected patrons in Goddard’s career. Goddard had a variety of such patrons that provided him with institutional support and connections to funding: Charles Walcott, Charles Abbot, Wallace Atwood, Charles Lindbergh, Harry Guggenheim, and George Lewis. Not only was Goddard’s progress driven forward by his own intrinsic interests, he was also able to connect with patrons who either shared his interests directly or who saw alignment of their own intrinsic interests with what Goddard was seeking to achieve.

As we have already seen in the history of the American Observatory Movement, the private funding attracted by Goddard is not an anomaly in the history of space exploration. On the contrary, Goddard’s program can be seen as part of a continuum of private funding for American space exploration going back for more than a century. Both as a share of total economic resources and in terms of equivalent production worker compensation, Goddard’s career funding falls far short of the level of funding lavished on many of the nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century observatories. Nevertheless, at over $70 million in 2015 GDP-ratio terms, Goddard received over the course of his career a level of funding not dissimilar to what might be required for a nontrivial NASA technology development program of the twenty-first century. Or to put it into a more historical context, the next privately funded liquid-fuel rocketry program to receive similar funding in the United States would not occur until the first private launch-vehicle efforts of the 1980s.

The fact that Goddard’s project funding, while substantial, was far below what could be obtained by American observatories can be attributed in part to the limited signaling ability of Goddard’s early research and development program. With his rockets at a prototype phase and with so many fits and starts to his experimental programs, Goddard was unable to provide the type of signal that could command the private funds he required: given the stage of his research, it was often enough of a signal of far-sighted beneficence for his institutional funders at Clark University and the Smithsonian to fund him at all. When signaling did become a motivating concern, as in Abbot’s impatience for a spectacular and newsworthy flight, patrons could be easily disappointed.

Nevertheless, the notion that a wealthy benefactor would come along to support the ambitious professor’s rocket to the

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