Now that my friend Edu Galán has made Woody Allen fashionable —and vice versa— his most famous quote resounds: “I am not very interested in posterity;
More than living in people's hearts, I would like to continue living in my apartment, ”she said —Allen, of course.
And he raised a question that some privileged people ask themselves: is it good business?
Would you exchange a difficult life for a splendid memory?
They used to call them heroes, but not even anymore.
Professor Goddard, in any case, could not choose.
Professor Goddard has a magnificent posterity;
his life was harder.
Robert Hutchins Goddard was born in 1882 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of a somewhat poor traditional family.
Electric light had just arrived in the most modern homes, his father invented devices and the boy was fascinated.
He was a sickly boy who read too much and finished school late but half wise;
when he started studying physics at university he already knew it.
And, above all, he had an idea that would guide him: "Science has taught us that we are too ignorant to confirm that something is impossible," he wrote in his 20s.
In those days men began to fly.
Hesitant, threatening, those planes changed everything.
Goddard became interested in them and, already in a Princeton laboratory, imagined rockets that only existed in two or three novels and calculated their possible trajectories while inventing a cathode tube for radio, among other
hobbies
.
At 30, married and settled, he became ill again - tuberculosis - and returned to his village.
The doctors told him that he would not live;
he said yes because he had to complete his inventions.
In 1914, before the first Great War, he patented two rockets, one with solid fuel, the other liquid.
In 1917 the Smithsonian Institute gave him a scholarship of $ 5,000.
With that fortune he quietly built scale cohetitos that allowed him to understand that only liquid fuel could remove them from the atmosphere.
His country entered the war and Goddard invented a projectile launcher that would become, years later, the bazooka.
And finally in 1919 he published an article -
A method to reach extreme altitudes
- where he explained his rockets and said, almost as they passed, that they could reach the Moon.
That detail made him the mockery of millions.
The New York Times
, definitive as always, ran an editorial —'You Test Our Credulity'— that laughed at his ideas, which “showed that its author lacked knowledge spread in high school”: a rocket can never be propelled in void of space, they said, so sure.
It is easy to be when that security is protected by everyone's;
It's so hard when it's made of doubts
Goddard replied that “every vision is a joke until someone does it;
then it becomes commonplace ”—and continued working.
In the next 20 years, out of the way, outwitted, he managed to launch three dozen small rockets that improved the mechanism.
He was always sick, he knew he would not live long, and he worked alone.
He died in 1945, at 63, disappointed and convinced at the same time.
Years later, when the Cold War launched the race for space, the American government took up its ideas: the rockets that reached the Moon were based on its inventions.
In July 1969, after half a century, the
Times
acknowledged its error in a three-line
article
.
NASA had already dedicated one of its largest centers to him: even today, 10,000 scientists and technicians work in a place named after him.
Robert Goddard is also streets, squares, schools.
And now that humanity, frightened by the drift of the Earth, thinks about space again, his name has circulated again: his posterity, it is said, is a great success - but he will probably never find out.