Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development.

Goddard’s own report to the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation on the rocket development he directed at Roswell, New Mexico, from July 1930 to July 1932 and September 1934 to September 1935 — the first public account of his historic first liquid-fuel rocket flight, launched at Auburn, Massachusetts on March 16, 1926 and reported to the Smithsonian that May 5 (Plate 1), together with the July 17, 1929 flight that carried a barometer and camera, both retrieved intact, and was mistaken by a witness for a burning airplane (Plate 2). Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh’s interest in the work brought it to Daniel Guggenheim's attention, whose foundation funded the Roswell program under an advisory committee chaired by Dr. John C. Merriam and including Dr. C. G. Abbot and Dr. Robert A. Millikan.

Documents the shop and the 60- and 20-foot launching towers erected at Roswell in September 1930 (Plates 3–4), the December 30, 1930 flight of an 11-foot, 33.5-pound rocket to 2,000 feet, and the first flight with gyroscopically controlled stabilizing vanes, on April 19, 1932. After a hiatus for laboratory work at Clark University, flights resumed in 1934–35 with steadily improving automatic stabilization: a March 28, 1935 flight reached 4,800 feet and 550 mph, and Plates 10–11 reproduce timed sequences of 16mm film frames from the October 14 and May 31, 1935 flights, which rose 4,000 and 7,500 feet respectively.

Illustrated with 11 plates. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Volume 95, No. 3 (Publication 3381), published March 16, 1936. Also in the collection: Goddard’s own account of his first liquid-fuel rocket flight, reprinted in Scientific American (August–September 1936), together with G. Edward Pendray’s 1938 profile of Goddard from the same magazine.