Technology History | Pakachoag Golf Course, Auburn — The Famous Photograph Is From the Wrong Day

The photograph everyone uses to illustrate the first liquid-fuel rocket launch was taken eight days before it. Esther Goddard photographed her husband beside the launch frame on 8 March 1926, after an attempt that failed. The flight came on 16 March. Robert Goddard was a physics professor at Clark University, and the field belonged to a relative he called Aunt Effie — the Asa Ward Farm, then farmland, now the ninth fairway of a municipal golf course. At half past two in the afternoon he opened a valve, and after a pause long enough to be embarrassing the rocket left the frame. It rose forty-one feet, flew for two and a half seconds, and came down a hundred and eighty-four feet away in the snow. That is the whole flight, and it is the reason the site is a National Historic Landmark. The machine looks wrong to a modern eye because the motor is on top, above the fuel tanks, with the nozzle firing downward past them — Goddard thought a rocket would fly straighter if pulled rather than pushed, and he was mistaken. It burned liquid oxygen and gasoline, stood about ten feet, and was assembled from thin pipes. Four people saw it: Goddard, Esther, his assistant Henry Sachs, and a Clark colleague, Percy Roope. Sachs lit the igniter with a blowtorch on a long stick and then sheltered behind a propped-up wooden door, which is visible leaning at the left edge of the photograph. Goddard's diary entry for the day is four lines long and mentions that the lower half of the nozzle burned off. Writing it up the next day he described the rocket leaving at express-train speed, and Esther as saying it looked like a dancer. The Ward family turned the farm into a golf course in 1939, and the town owns it now. A granite marker stands at the launch point, roughly midway between the tee and the green on the ninth fairway, and the site was designated in 1966. You can walk up to it, but it sits on a live golf course, so pay attention to what is happening on the tee behind you. Photo: Goddard with the rocket in its frame at Auburn, taken by Esther Goddard on 8 March 1926 — the machine in the picture is the one that flew on the 16th, but this is not the launch. Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Clark University's Goddard collection; the Town of Auburn; Goddard's diary as reproduced by This Day in Aviation. Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center archive, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.