On Sep 1, 9:30*am, " wrote:
On Aug 31, 1:40*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

Looks a bit like a Apollo CSM; looks even more like a flying dildo
:http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/...g-to-the-moon/
I imagine that unfortunate resemblance was one of the things that turned
Goddard off on the press.

Did the average person know what a dildo looked like, in 1930? *How
old are dildos in the public arena? *(The great thing about human
history is how things connect.)

I had serious doubts that he ever built a rocket that reached a speed of
8,000 feet per second, so I checked up on that...the _exhaust velocity_
was 8,000 FPS.

David Clary's biography of Goddard ("Rocket Man") doesn't seem to
report exhaust velocity of any of Goddard's rockets.

I'm always fascinated by this era's approach to cockpit design. *My
guess is that the artist was using as a model the Army's balloon
experiments.

Mike

8,000 ft/sec is about 250 sec Isp.

A propellant weight of 63.21% total vehicle weight would allow rocket
speed to equal exhaust speed.

Goddard's first flight was in 1926 and lasted only 2.5 seconds and
flew 41 feet. It was mostly a frame 4 meters long and had a 0.5 meter
by 0.1 meter diameter fuel tank and oxidizer tank - looks like high
pressure piping sawed off and capped. Don't know thickness or
weight. Not likely a 63.21% propellant fraction.

By 1929 Goddard got Lindbergh's support and then the Guggenheim's.
That's when he moved to New Mexico.

By 1931 he built a gyro guided rocket and more modern looking casings
and tail fins. He broke the sound barrier the next year. He not only
built the gyroscope guided rocket, but also developed regenerative
cooling, thin walled propellant tanks, and turbopump delivery of
liquid oxygen and fuel to the engine.

In 1937 - 11 years after his first flight at his Aunt's farm in
Massachusetts, Goddard launched an L-series, Section-B rocket that
fired for 22.3 seconds and achieved an altitude of 9,000 feet. The
highest achieved by Goddard, and far outclassed by the Germans who
were building rockets by that time.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/...in_goddard.jpg
http://rlv.zcache.com/robert_goddard...31t5wm_400.jpg

It seems to me that the L series rockets could have attained 63.21%
propellant weight and achieved their exhaust speed.

After Goddard's death in 1942 the United States government paid Mrs.
Goddard $1 million for all of her husband's patents according to
Arthur Clarke.