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wbjournal.com | July 22, 2019 | Worcester Business Journal 9 build spacecra and technology to study Earth and space. "He was extremely critical to the space program," said Fordyce Williams, Clark's coordinator of archives and special collections. at Goddard would one day be cited as so instrumental to our space explo- rations would have seemed unlikely in his day. His ideas about reaching space – something he wrote about in 1909, with thoughts of interplanetary travel – were ridiculed at the time, according to NASA. Goddard, who was born in Worcester in 1882, graduated from WPI as a gener- al science major in 1908. ere he began working on a rocket in a basement lab of a physics building. He served on WPI's Physics Depart- ment faculty for two years before be- coming a graduate student at Clark. He earned his master's in physics in 1910 and his doctorate a year later. ree years aer graduation, Goddard already received patents for rockets using both liquid and solid fuels. By 1920, he wrote in a report his vision of sending a rocket to the Moon. Until Goddard, rocket technology had advanced little in centuries, since rockets began using gunpowder in the 13th cen- tury, according to NASA. But Goddard saw benefits of using liquid fuel instead, and spent the next 17 years working on firing a rocket off the ground, using grant funding from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and the Daniel Guggenheim Foundation. He finally did so on March 16, 1926, on a farm in Auburn today part of the Pakachoag Golf Course. Goddard's diary entry that day said precious little – the rocket had fired up 41 feet and went horizontally 184 feet, a flight of about 2.5 seconds. e milestone came and went with little notice. Aer all, with so many false Robert Goddard preparing to test a rocket in Auburn. An obelisk on a golf course now marks the place where he launched his first one. Continued on Page 10 (Top) Exploration of the solar system wouldn't have been possible without Central Mass. technology. (Above) Space suit equipment designed by Worcester manufacturer David Clark Co. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/NASA PHOTO/WORCESTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY PHOTO/DAVID CLARK CO.