Description
Scholarship in the history of science, technology, and society has extensively examined the influence of American rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard. This thesis will focus on American and international media reactions to Robert Goddard and his 1919 manuscript, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. Goddard’s seminal paper and the public attention it garnered between 1919-1920 serves as the basis for this socio-cultural study of early spaceflight and rocketry. During the 1920s, American, German, and Russian societies exhibited vastly different cultural, academic, and scientific norms. While media criticism of Goddard’s work subverted the formation of an American spaceflight culture in the early 1920s, the same publicity effectively enhanced the credibility of Goddard’s work in Germany and Russia. In the United States, headlining stories capturing Goddard’s proposed “moon-going-rocket” became the subject of criticism and mockery. However, in the years following 1929, media tones shifted away from the previous dismissal and mockery of Goddard's rocketry research. With new developments in German rocketry emerging, the American public’s attention, interests, and concern focused on European technological advancements. By the late 1920s, rocketry emerged as the next logical step in ballistic military technology, fueled by Goddard’s research. Through the lens of 1920s American media, Goddard's rocketry research was transformed from a Jules Verne-inspired work of science fiction to a closely guarded matter of national security.
