On March 16, 1926, on his aunt Effie's snowy cabbage farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, a quiet college professor named Robert Goddard lit the fuse on a contraption that looked a bit like a metal Christmas tree. The rocket coughed, hissed, and then leapt into the cold sky. It traveled about 41 feet up, flew for 2.5 seconds, and landed in a cabbage patch 184 feet away. A small thing, really. Except that it was the first liquid-fueled rocket ever flown, and it pointed the way to the Moon.
Goddard had been obsessed with space since he was 17, when he climbed a cherry tree in 1899 and dreamed of building something that could fly to Mars. People made fun of him. A 1920 New York Times editorial called him an idiot for thinking a rocket could ever work in the vacuum of space (the paper printed a formal apology in 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched). Goddard ignored the mockery and quietly designed dozens of rockets, eventually launching them higher than two miles into the sky.
When Goddard died in 1945, the United States had barely begun a space program. Just 24 years after that, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, riding a rocket whose design used 214 of Goddard's patented inventions. NASA later named one of its biggest research centers the Goddard Space Flight Center in his honor. Every rocket that's ever blasted humans into orbit, landed rovers on Mars, or sent probes past Pluto can trace its family tree back to a tiny rocket in a cabbage patch, flown by a stubborn dreamer who refused to come down from his cherry tree.
