Out of town now, driving through the desert, I found myself remembering Robert Goddard, the rocket scientist. Did you know he’d lived in Roswell? He did some of his important experiments there, the ones that paved the way for human spaceflight. Also for long-range missiles. He was there before the war, an intense, tubercular obsessive firing projectiles into the wasteland. Without him, there’d be no moon landing, no ICBMs, no Cold War as we know it. No rovers on Mars. Goddard thought we could use rockets to reach the far cosmos, spoke of sending messages to alien civilizations inscribed on
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