One hundred years ago yesterday, Robert H. Goddard ignited a small rocket fueled by gasoline and liquid oxygen on a frozen farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. That flight lasted roughly 2.5 seconds. Today, NASA’s Space Launch System carries four liquid-fueled engines capable of pushing a crew capsule toward the Moon, and the agency successfully loaded propellant into the SLS for Artemis II countdown rehearsals in February 2026. The centennial of Goddard’s 1926 launch lands at a moment when the same core technology he proved viable still defines how the United States plans to return astronauts to lunar orbit.
A Frozen Field in Auburn
On March 16, 1926, Goddard, a Clark-trained scientist, launched the world’s first liquid-propellant rocket from a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The device burned gasoline and liquid oxygen, a combination no one had successfully flown before. Funding for the work came through a Smithsonian grant via the Hodgkins Fund, which had also supported publication of Goddard’s 1919 theoretical paper, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” through the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections.
That paper, later reviewed in Nature, laid out the physics of using controlled combustion to achieve high-altitude flight. The 1926 launch turned theory into hardware. A replica of the original rocket now sits in the National Air and Space Museum, donated by NASA in 1976 according to the Smithsonian’s collection record. NASA has framed the event as the starting point for modern spaceflight, highlighting the Auburn launch in a historical overview that traces a direct line from Goddard’s experiments to contemporary missions.
From Gasoline to Liquid Hydrogen
The distance between Goddard’s gasoline-and-oxygen device and the engines that will carry astronauts around the Moon is enormous, but the underlying principle has not changed: mix a liquid fuel with a liquid oxidizer, ignite the combination in a combustion chamber, and direct the exhaust through a nozzle. What has changed is the chemistry and the engineering tolerances. The RS-25 engines mounted on the SLS core stage burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, a propellant pairing that yields far higher performance than gasoline ever could. Each SLS vehicle carries four core engines and twin solid boosters, a configuration sized for missions beyond low Earth orbit.
The RS-25 did not appear out of nowhere for the Artemis program. These engines trace their lineage directly to the Space Shuttle, with inventory transferred from the shuttle program to SLS. NASA’s description of the core stage propulsion system emphasizes that the RS-25s are high-performance, reusable-class engines adapted for expendable use on SLS. That heritage means NASA is flying proven combustion hardware rather than designing a new liquid engine from scratch, a decision that trades cutting-edge optimization for reliability built over decades of shuttle flights. The tradeoff is real: shuttle-era engines carry shuttle-era manufacturing constraints, and the supply of refurbished units is finite.
Testing for the Next Generation
That finite supply is exactly why NASA has been running an RS-25 certification series at Stennis Space Center. The tests are designed to validate new-production RS-25 engines that will begin flying on Artemis V and later missions. Until then, the earlier Artemis flights will rely on refurbished shuttle-heritage engines. The certification campaign matters because it determines whether NASA can sustain a regular cadence of lunar missions or will face engine-availability bottlenecks as the program matures.
Most public attention focuses on launch spectacles and crew announcements, but engine certification testing is where the program’s long-term viability gets decided. If the new-production RS-25s pass their test series, NASA secures a repeatable manufacturing pipeline for deep-space missions. If problems emerge, the agency faces a gap between the last shuttle-era engines and the first new ones, potentially stalling flights beyond the initial Artemis missions. In that sense, the work at Stennis echoes Goddard’s own methodical test campaigns, in which he fired experimental engines on test stands long before committing them to flight.
Artemis II Fueling Clears a Recent Hurdle
The most recent sign of progress came on February 19, 2026, when NASA successfully fueled the SLS rocket and demonstrated the launch countdown for Artemis II. The test followed resolution of equipment issues that had required attention before the agency could proceed with launch pad operations. A successful fueling demonstration is not a launch, but it confirms that the vehicle’s cryogenic plumbing, ground support equipment, and propellant loading sequences work as intended under real countdown conditions.
Artemis II is designed to send a crew around the Moon without landing, building on the uncrewed Artemis I mission that previously tested SLS and Orion systems. NASA’s mission materials for Artemis I emphasized that the first flight would demonstrate the integrated performance of the rocket and spacecraft before humans climbed aboard. Each step in that sequence, and in Artemis II, depends on liquid propulsion performing exactly as designed, from the moment super-cold hydrogen and oxygen flow into the core stage tanks through engine ignition and the eight-minute ascent burn. The February fueling test was a necessary gate before the mission can proceed to an actual launch attempt.
Why Liquid Fuel Still Wins
A century of rocketry has produced alternatives to liquid engines. Solid rocket motors are simpler and cheaper to store. Electric propulsion works well for deep-space probes. Nuclear thermal propulsion is under study for future Mars missions. Yet for the specific job of lifting heavy payloads off Earth and accelerating them toward the Moon, high-thrust liquid engines remain the workhorse technology.
Liquids offer three advantages that Goddard understood in principle and that modern engineers exploit in detail. First, they are throttleable: by controlling propellant flow, operators can adjust thrust in real time, shaping ascent trajectories and managing loads on the vehicle. Second, they are restartable, enabling upper stages and spacecraft to perform multiple burns for orbital insertion, translunar injection, and course corrections. Third, they deliver high specific impulse, especially with cryogenic propellants like liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which means more performance per unit of propellant mass.
Those characteristics explain why the SLS core stage relies on liquid engines even though it is flanked by large solid rocket boosters. The solids provide brute-force thrust off the pad, while the RS-25s offer precise control and efficiency throughout ascent. The same logic applies across much of spaceflight: crewed launch vehicles, high-energy upper stages, and deep-space departure burns all lean heavily on liquid propulsion.
A Century-Long Throughline
Seen from Auburn’s frozen field, the modern launch infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center would be almost unrecognizable. The scale of the SLS, the complexity of its ground systems, and the global attention surrounding each Artemis milestone all dwarf Goddard’s quiet experiment. Yet the technical throughline is unmistakable. Both the 1926 rocket and the 2020s mega-booster depend on pumps, valves, tanks, and nozzles designed to tame volatile propellants and turn them into controlled, directional thrust.
Goddard’s early work was often met with skepticism, but his calculations and hardware proved that liquid propellants could be stored, fed, and burned in a way that made rocketry practical rather than fanciful. A hundred years later, NASA’s reliance on liquid engines for its flagship lunar program is a testament to how sound that foundation was. The materials are stronger, the computers faster, and the missions more ambitious, but the core idea remains the same.
As Artemis II moves closer to launch and the RS-25 certification campaign advances, the centennial of that first liquid-fueled flight underscores how incremental engineering progress can accumulate into epochal change. The path from a 2.5-second hop over a Massachusetts farm to crewed journeys around the Moon runs straight through a century of liquid propulsion, a technology that, for all the new concepts on the horizon, still defines how humans leave Earth.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
