There’s a moment in John Williams’s *Star Wars* overture when the brass surges upward. You don’t just hear it; you feel propulsion turning into pure possibility. On 16 March 1926, in a snow-dusted field in Auburn, Mass., Robert Goddard created an earlier version of that same feeling. His first liquid-fueled rocket—a spindly, three meter tangle of pipes and tanks—lifted off, climbed about 12.5 meters, traveled roughly 56 meters downrange, and crashed into the frozen ground after 2.5 seconds. A few witnesses, Goddard’s helpers, shivered in the cold. The little machine defied common sense. It rose through the air with nothing to push against. Anyone who still insisted spaceflight was impossible now faced a question: Why had this contraption risen at all? Six years earlier, *The New York Times* had ridiculed Goddard, declaring that rockets could never work in a vacuum and implying that he had somehow forgotten high-school physics.…