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The first liquid-fuel rocket
Solid fuel burns until it is spent; liquid fuel can be throttled and shut off, and that is the precondition for steering a rocket. Goddard was ridiculed by the New York Times in 1920, which wrote that he lacked “the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools” because a rocket supposedly could not work in vacuum. The paper printed a retraction in July 1969, the day after Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon. German engineers followed his work closely in the 1930s.
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