There is no better time to kick someone that when he is down. Maybe they should leave aeronautics to the experts.
New York Times Editorial, 1920
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 reaction, 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.
Good to know that some maintain their standards. The NYT editorial staff is just as knowledgeable now as then.
I remember this being alluded to in a Heinlein novel, about rocket travel, written in 1946. I thought it was a joke. Good lord. That's the best thing I've read all day. Thanks for posting that.
Now that is hitting below the belt...well maybe not the best metaphor since I'm not certain they have anything of importance below their belt, be "they" male or female.
Well, it a great "Zot" anyway.
The real mystery is why anyone continues to listen to them.