Lost in Space

Last week the world's most celebrated aviator delivered himself on the subject which most aviators consider the world's greatest joke. Wrote Charles Augustus Lindbergh in a letter which was read aloud by Clark University's President Wallace Walter Atwood at graduation ceremonies in Worcester, Mass.: "Clark University is taking part in a project which may have far-reaching effects on the future of civilization. For many years a member of the staff, Professor Robert Hutchings Goddard, has been experimenting with rockets. . . .

"The rocket is now in that most interesting period of discovery where the shorelines are unplotted and the future limited only by imagination. . . . As the airplane gave man freedom from the earth, the rocket offers him freedom from the air. From the standpoint of science, the rocket offers the only known possibility of sending instruments to altitudes above those reached by sounding balloons. . . . From the standpoint of commerce, we must look to the rocket if we hope to attain speeds of transport above a few hundred miles an hour. . . . From the standpoint of war, we must consider the fact that rockets may carry explosives faster than the airplane and farther than the projectile. . . .

"A rocket enthusiast . . . in an unguarded moment . . . might prophesy that we will eventually travel at speeds governed only by the acceleration which the human body can stand, and that in rocketing between America and Europe we will accelerate halfway across the ocean and decelerate during the other half. Or, he might even point his rocket toward another planet and, without regard to fuel supply, landing facilities, or Professor Goddard, lose himself in interstellar space."

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