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
bc suspects high schools then, certainly now, were better at the FCI
than the editorial staff of the NYT