On July 7, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office granted a shy physics professor at Clark University two patents that, taken together, describe almost every rocket that has ever left Earth. US Patent 1,102,653 ("Rocket Apparatus") described a multi-stage rocket — separable sections that drop away as their fuel is spent, so the vehicle grows lighter as it climbs. US Patent 1,103,503, granted eight days later, described a rocket fed by liquid propellants — a fuel and an oxidizer pumped continuously into a combustion chamber, rather than the compressed gunpowder that had defined "rockets" since 13th-century China.

Robert H. Goddard was 31, tubercular, and working almost alone. He had no wind tunnel, no test stand, no funding beyond a modest Smithsonian grant that arrived in 1917. What he had was a conviction — worked out in a cherry tree in Worcester, Massachusetts at age 17 — that a properly designed rocket could reach not just the upper atmosphere but the Moon.

Both patents predate the founding of every rocket program in history. When Goddard filed them:

• The Wright Brothers' first powered flight was 11 years old.
• Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had published rocket theory in Russian (1903), but had built nothing and filed no patents.
• Wernher von Braun was two years old.
• The word "astronaut" would not enter English for another 15 years.

The multi-stage patent, in particular, is uncanny. Goddard describes exactly what a modern Falcon 9 or Saturn V does: a rocket composed of stacked, self-contained propulsion units, each of which fires, exhausts, and separates in sequence. The drawing in the patent — a slender stack of three tapering sections — could be redrawn as a modern launch vehicle with almost no changes.

The liquid-fuel patent is arguably more radical. Solid-fuel rockets were ancient; liquid fuel was heretical. It required cryogenic tanks, injectors, turbopumps, regeneratively cooled combustion chambers — an entire discipline of plumbing that did not yet exist. Goddard spent the next 12 years building it himself. On March 16, 1926, in his Aunt Effie's cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts, his liquid-oxygen-and-gasoline rocket flew 41 feet in 2.5 seconds. It is to rocketry what Kitty Hawk is to aviation.

The reception was not warm. On January 13, 1920, The New York Times editorial page ridiculed Goddard for suggesting a rocket could operate in a vacuum: he "seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools," they wrote, because everyone knows a rocket needs air to push against. (It doesn't — Newton's Third Law works fine in vacuum.) The Times printed a correction on July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 left Earth: "It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum. The Times regrets the error."

Goddard died in 1945 holding 214 patents, most filed posthumously by his widow Esther. When the U.S. government finally cataloged them in 1960, it agreed to pay his estate $1 million — the largest patent settlement in American history at the time — because essentially every rocket NASA and the DoD had built infringed on Goddard's claims. Gimbaled thrust, gyroscopic guidance, film cooling, variable-thrust valves, turbopumps: he had patented them all.

Every time a Falcon 9 booster lands upright on a drone ship, it is executing a control problem Goddard sketched in the 1930s. Every stage separation on an Ariane, an SLS, or a Starship traces back to 1,102,653. The cherry tree is still in Worcester.