When people think about the last century of innovation, certain names tend to come up: Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford, or Steve Jobs, people whose early ideas seemed impractical, until they weren’t. One of those innovators was closer to home than most people realize. Robert Goddard developed the foundations of modern rocketry in Auburn.
A substantive portion of his early research took place at Clark University, which gave him something essential: a teaching position, lab access, and the intellectual freedom to explore ideas. As Goddard’s experiments grew more ambitious, however, so did the cost.
While Worcester had significant industrial capital, it lacked capital willing to absorb long timelines, repeated failure, and uncertain commercial outcomes. There were factories and financiers, but few pathways for translating speculative research into sustained experimentation.
Without sustained private investment, Goddard pursued funding elsewhere, moving his most advanced work out of the region and taking with it the economic, technical, and reputational impact that could have anchored Worcester as an early center of aerospace research.
Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution published his research and, in the years following World War I, provided an early $5,000 grant, roughly $125,000 today.
Additionally, the Guggenheim family of New York City funded his work in Roswell, New Mexico, for years, investing the equivalent of several million dollars.
Today, Worcester has built the kind of infrastructure needed to support the next Goddard: equipped lab space, makerspaces, coworking environments, and a dense support ecosystem. Groups like WorcLab, Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, and Auxilium represent just part of a broader network providing technical resources, education, mentorship, and capital across stages, allowing ideas to be tested, refined, and scaled without leaving Central Massachusetts.
Talented students and researchers out of The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Worcester State University, or one of our many other schools, don’t need more inspiration. They need places to test, build, and fail, without having to leave the region to do it. That need extends beyond campus walls, to graduates building hardware prototypes, founders developing new software, and others in the community working to turn technical ideas into reality. It may just be you.
The real question for the next hundred years isn’t whether Worcester can produce world-class thinkers. It’s whether founders, investors, and institutions commit to building and scaling companies here, so the next generation of Goddards can build right here at home.
Tyler J. Ojala is the director of operations at WorcLab, a Worcester-based incubator and coworking space.
