Extract from ABC News
India has just landed on the Moon, but 100 years ago the idea of leaving Earth and exploring the universe was considered fanciful and ridiculous.
But it's because of Robert Goddard's discovery that India, China, the US and Russia are all rushing to get back to the Moon.
They're all trying to build a petrol station on the Moon's south pole, so we can use it as a fuelling station to get to Mars, and beyond.
Press called his ideas 'absurd'
Goddard had been trying to get to space since he was a teenager.
At age 17, he climbed a cherry tree in his Massachusetts backyard to cut off dead branches and wondered what it would be like to just keep climbing.
He had a vision of a rocket rising from the meadow below into space, and decided he would spend the rest of his life making that a reality.
When he became a physics professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, he wrote a paper suggesting rockets could take humans to space.
He said to achieve it, you would need multiple rockets attached to each other — one would push the others up, then drop away and another would take over.
To illustrate it, he included some theoretical calculations for getting a rocket to carry a small load to the Moon.
The New York Times got hold of his paper and decided he was an idiot because rockets don't work in space. They dubbed him the "moon man".
"That professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
Goddard responded to a reporter's question.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realised, it becomes commonplace."
Goddard became very famous, but not in a particularly good way. He was sent insulting letters for years, and started to operate in secrecy.
He struggled to get funding for his research because people thought it was ridiculous.
'The Times regrets the error'
But Robert Goddard was right — he proved his theory that everything you needed to send a rocket into space could be found in water, using electricity to split it into oxygen and hydrogen gas.
Cool them til they turn into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, and you have the two ingredients needed for a powerful but controllable rocket.
In 1926, Goddard ran experiments with a small rocket on a metal frame on his Aunt Effie's farm.
He proved that liquid oxygen and hydrogen could be used to power a rocket.
Forty-nine years after the New York Times's editorial, they issued an apology to Goddard — rockets clearly worked in space.
How did they know this? Because one was on its way to the Moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on board.
Aldrin's father, Edwin Aldrin Sr, studied rocketry under Goddard as an undergraduate.
Now he was watching his son take a tiny copy of Goddard's autobiography with him on board Apollo 11.
Goddard had died 24 years earlier.
He never saw a man-made rocket in space, but every single space mission was made possible by his discoveries.
In 1959, NASA established the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.
Today, he is considered the father of modern rocket propulsion.
Ice discovery bring Mars dream closer
Goddard didn't just prove you could make fuel from water. In 1920, he was also the first person to theorise there was ice at the lunar poles of the Moon.
If correct, this would mean you could stop at the Moon to make more fuel, making it possible to go to Mars, and beyond.
Getting from Earth to the Moon needs about 1.5 Olympic swimming pool's worth of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
The Moon is only a three-day journey from Earth but Mars is at least a six-month trip one-way.
For a mission to Mars you need a much bigger ship, and that means you need much more fuel.
The fuel would be so heavy that just carrying it all into space from Earth would cost billions of dollars.
In the 1990s, we discovered ice on the Moon, hidden in shadows on the south pole.
And what's in ice? Hydrogen and oxygen — the very things we need to make fuel.
Recent discoveries have found significantly more than expected, sparking a race to return to the Moon.
India was the first, landing on the south pole in August this year.
One day quite soon, the south pole of the Moon will likely host a rocket refuelling station — or possibly several. They'll look like fuel refineries: a big industrial process.
Removing the need to yeet our fuel into space from the earth's surface makes deep space exploration much more viable.
Is space 'the next war-fighting domain'?
A lot of countries are trying to get their hands on the small area of ice on the Moon's south pole, sparking fears there could be a fight over who lays claim to it.
Donald Trump called space "the next war-fighting domain", and created the US Space Force and US Space Command as military organisations during his presidency.
And he's not talking about robot wars. By 2026, the US plans to regularly send humans to the Moon. China hopes to follow them in 2030.
Mining ice is going to be complicated and hazardous enough without the threat of humans fighting each other, particularly given the nearest hospital is 400,000 kilometres away.
A lot of people think it would be nice if there were some kind of laws in place to control what happens in space.
There is something called the "Moon Agreement of 1979", which called for all profits made in space to be distributed to all countries, especially those in need.
Australia signed it, but none of the countries with space programs did. In 2020, the Trump administration expressly rejected the agreement.
Instead, Trump put forward the Artemis Accords, which encourage countries to cooperate peacefully, act transparently and responsibly, and rescue people who get into trouble while mining in space.
Australia signed that too. Anything to do with mining, we'll sign it.
Now, 28 countries have signed it, including India — but China and Russia have not.
During the age of discovery, when European explorers sailed around the world looking for new lands and treasures, resupply ports were often sites of conflict.
That was hundreds of years ago. Now, the new frontier of exploration is space — have we changed much since then?
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