On the thirteenth of January, 1920, the New York Times printed an unsigned editorial mocking a quiet Massachusetts physics professor for suggesting that a rocket might one day reach the moon. The editorial was titled A Severe Strain on Credulity. Forty-nine years and six months later, three days before Apollo eleven landed on the moon, the New York Times printed a retraction. The physics professor had been dead for twenty-three years.

His name was Robert Hutchings Goddard, a slightly built thirty-seven-year-old physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had just published a quiet seventy-page Smithsonian monograph titled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. One speculative paragraph mentioned the moon. The New York Times editorial board concluded that Goddard did not understand basic physics. The paper wrote that he "only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

Goddard spent the rest of his life being mocked. He moved his experiments from Massachusetts to a remote ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico, where the local farmers thought he was a witch. On the sixteenth of March, 1926, in a snowy field in Auburn, Massachusetts, he and his wife Esther launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket. It rose forty-one feet and landed in a cabbage patch. He filed more than two hundred patents. He died of throat cancer on the tenth of August, 1945, aged sixty-two. He had been ridiculed by the paper of record his entire working life.

On the sixteenth of July, 1969, the Saturn five carrying the Apollo eleven astronauts lifted off from Cape Kennedy. Forty-nine years and six months after the editorial in the Times. The next morning, the seventeenth of July, three days before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, the paper of record published a brief item on page forty-three of the morning edition.

It read: "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."

Robert Goddard had been dead twenty-three years and eleven months.

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