Rocket Man Quotes

“Esther Goddard faced a problem similar to Libbie Custer’s.”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“He had the vision, certainly, and there was almost nothing that was later developed successfully that he didn’t try, at least once. But he was very much a loner.”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“Dr. Huer was modeled on a man whose face and ambitions to send rockets into space were familiar to newspaper readers everywhere—”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“revised model was ready on 16 March, a clear, cold, still day.”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“in those days the idea of a rocket ship was just foolishness. Anyone interested in it, we thought, must have been a little off. I felt the faculty respected him as a physicist … but still [thought he was] queer.”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“He had discovered that a rocket was more accurate when its head end was heavier than the rest of the missile, an elementary principle of ballistic stability known to archers for millennia.40”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“This … made me realize that if a way to navigate space were to be discovered—or invented—it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics…”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

“What he achieved was far more than his detractors in the past generation have suggested, even if less than his boosters in the previous generation claimed.”
― David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age