There’s a moment in John Williams’s Star Wars overture when the brass surges upward. You don’t just hear it; you feel propulsion turning into pure possibility.
On 16 March 1926, in a snow-dusted field in Auburn, Mass., Robert Goddard created an earlier version of that same feeling. His first liquid-fueled rocket—a spindly, three meter tangle of pipes and tanks—lifted off, climbed about 12.5 meters, traveled roughly 56 meters downrange, and crashed into the frozen ground after 2.5 seconds. A few…
