[thirsteh]

The actual New York Times article is funny and sad: http://web.archive.org/web/20080704103647/http://it.is.rice....

Robert Goddard was ridiculed for most of his life for having such lofty ambitions, chiefly building a machine that had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. Yet we owe it to him (and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) that we have now sent machines and human beings to many worlds. I can't think of a better example of "don't listen to the haters."