Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

More famous in his day than Einstein or Edison, Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) was the father of rocketry and space flight, launching the world's first liquid-fuel rockets and the first powered vehicles to break the sound barrier. Supported by Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim, he invented the methods that to this day carry men to the moon and make jet planes fly. Yet he is the forgotten man of space age, ignored by his own government until the Germans demonstrated his priniples in WWII, when they instead usurped his patents. This is the definitive biography.