The Wonder Mission is kicking off the First Launch Space Centennial — marking 100 years since Clark University alumnus and professor Robert Goddard, aka the Father of Modern Rocketry, launched the first liquid-fuel rocket — where Goddard’s passion for space began.
On an early October evening in 1899, 17-year-old Robert Goddard climbed his family’s cherry tree and looked up into a sky full of stars and the bright planet Mars. At that moment, having recently read H.G Wells’s “War of the Worlds,“ he experienced a vision of space travel that occupied him for the rest of his life. Later, he wrote in his journal, “I was a different boy when I descended the ladder. Life now had purpose for me.” Every year thereafter, Goddard celebrated it as his “Anniversary Day.”
Students and teachers from the Worcester Public Schools, Worcester Technical High School, Worcester Academy, the Bancroft School, Clark University, and WPI have been invited to attend a short ceremony to help plant a new large cherry tree at Robert and Esther Goddard’s multi-generational home in Worcester. Like NASA’s moon tree project, where seeds that were flown around the moon were distributed and planted at schools around the country, seeds from the new Goddard tree will similarly be shared so students can grow their own “space trees.”
