Rockets: Two Classic Papers

This book reprints Goddard's two reports to the Smithsonian Institute, which funded part of Goddard's research. The first report dates from 1919 and summarizes Goddard's lab experiments, quoting extensively from his lab notebooks. As a fuel in his early rockets, Goddard used explosive charges of gunpowder or guncotton, which, in any practical rocket, was to be fed to the engine by a mechanism resembling a machine gun. The paper reveals Goddard's critical discovery: by using the steam nozzle of Swedish inventor Carl de Laval (1845-1913) as a rocket engine, the efficiency of rocket engines increased from 2 to 64 per cent. This high efficiency reduced to practical levels the amount of fuel need to launch a rocket into space. The report also explains the benefits of using multi-stage rockets. The second report is basically just a set of photographs of Goddard's work on liquid-fueled rockets during the 1920s and 1930s. These rockets incorporated gyroscopic control in order to stabilize them in flight. The book also includes both a brief biography of Dr. Goddard and a forward by Dr. Goddard, in which he briefly provides some background to the research that's featured in the book. Future editions of this book might be improved by adding an appendix deriving the equations in the first paper. Also included might be a copy of Goddard's U.S. patent 1,102,653, which includes diagrams illustrating the "machine gun" propulsion system that's proposed in the first paper, and which also shows a multi-stage rocket with a crude liquid-fueled second stage.