This was a seminal work that inspired most of the original rocket pioneers. Verne used real engineering analysis to arrive at the design of his cannon and manned moon projectible. As a result, at the time of the Apollo 8 and 11 missions it was noted that Verne had made a number of correct predictions about the actual missions....

Father of American spaceflight; launched first liquid-fuel rocket, 1926. By 1936, he had solved all of the fundamental problems of guided liquid propellant rockets and was testing essentially modern vehicles. But he was reclusive, took patents but did not share lessons learned with others. Aerojet and von Braun did not benefit from his experience.

Tsiolkovsky considered the possibility of living in outer space and the effects of zero gravity. For the first time he included a drawing of a spacecraft that could orient itself in space with the help of reactive jets (but not change its position by propulsive rockets).

German Austrian engineer and early advocate of the use of rockets for flight. Opel supported Valier's original rocket car tests as publicity. He dreamed of rocket-propelled transatlantic aircraft and later became Opel's competitor. Valier died in a careless accident in 1932, in his laboratory in Berlin, when working on a rocket combustion chamber. It exploded and a small metal fragment hit his pulmonary artery.

Goddard's imagination and inventiveness is encouraged by his father, who gives him a telescope, microscope, and subscription to Scientific American. He is constantly tinkering, trying to work aluminium, build a rigid-skin balloon. Illness prevents him from attending classes, so he becomes self-educated. Uniquely among rocket pioneers he is inspired by H G Wells' War of the Worlds rather than the works of Jules Verne. On this date, while climbing a cherry tree, the ten year old had a vision. He saw a huge flying machine, propelled by whirling unequal horizontal centrifugal devices, rising from a pit, heading for Mars. Although he would give up working on a 'perpetual motion' device of this type for several years, he abandoned the idea when he discovered Newton's laws of motion.