Robert H. Goddard
The German V-2

Don't you know about your own rocket pioneer? Dr. Goddard was ahead of us all.

– Wernher von Braun, when asked about his work, following World War II

In the spring of 1945, Goddard saw a captured German V-2 ballistic missile, in the naval laboratory in Annapolis, Maryland, where he had been working under contract. The unlaunched rocket had been captured by the US Army from the Mittelwerk factory in the Harz mountains in Germany and samples began to be shipped by Special Mission V-2 on 22 May 1945.

After a thorough inspection, Goddard was convinced that the Germans had "stolen" his work. Though the design details were not exactly the same, the basic design of the V-2 was similar to one of Goddard's rockets. The V-2, however, was technically far more advanced than the most successful of the rockets designed and tested by Goddard. The Peenemünde rocket group led by Wernher von Braun may have benefited from the pre-1939 contacts to a limited extent, but had also started from the work of their own space pioneer, Hermann Oberth; they also had the benefit of intensive state funding, large-scale production facilities (using slave labor), and repeated flight-testing that allowed them to refine their designs. Oberth was a space flight theorist and had never built a rocket, but he tested small liquid propellant thrust chambers in 1929–30 which were not advances in the "state of the art". In 1922 Oberth asked Goddard for a copy of his 1919 paper and was sent one though Goddard was distrustful of the militaristic Germans. Later, Oberth erroneously believed that Goddard lacked vision, was interested only in studying the atmosphere, and did not comprehend the future of rocketry for space exploration.

Nevertheless, in 1963, von Braun, reflecting on the history of rocketry, said of Goddard: "His rockets... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles". He once recalled that "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible." After World War II von Braun reviewed Goddard's patents and believed they contained enough technical information to build a large missile.

Three features developed by Goddard appeared in the V-2: (1) turbopumps were used to inject fuel into the combustion chamber; (2) gyroscopically controlled vanes in the nozzle stabilized the rocket until external vanes in the air could do so; and (3) excess alcohol was fed in around the combustion chamber walls, so that a blanket of evaporating gas protected the engine walls from the combustion heat.

The Germans had been watching Goddard's progress before the war and became convinced that large, liquid fuel rockets were feasible. General Walter Dornberger, head of the V-2 project, used the idea that they were in a race with the U.S. and that Goddard had "disappeared" (to work with the Navy) as a way to persuade Hitler to raise the priority of the V-2.
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