On Oct. 19, 1899, a frail teenager in Worcester, Massachusetts, climbed a cherry tree and gazed at the sky. From his perch, Robert Hutchings Goddard imagined a device that could one day lift humanity beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
He later described that moment as the turning point of his life. To neighbors, he was an odd boy with books and telescopes, who annoyed them with noisy rockets he fired off from his yard; to history, he would become the reluctant pioneer of modern rocketry.
