A Severe Strain on the Credulity
...As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to
the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor
Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device.
It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler
to the moon that one begins to doubt... for after the rocket quits
our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be
neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges
it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in
Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution,
does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need
to have something better than a vacuum against which to react... Of
course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high
schools.
-- New York Times Editorial, 1920