Goddard was obsessed with secrecy: he was convinced that everyone on the planet was trying to steal his ideas. That meant that he only worked with a few workmen

Goddard was obsessed with secrecy: he was convinced that everyone on the planet was trying to steal his ideas. That meant that he only worked with a few workmen (most of whom were related to his wife) who he trusted, he gave them the plans for one part at a time, they would build that one part and then return plan and part to him. He did all the designs himself and did all the final assembly himself- only he knew how the parts fit together. This meant that, even given that he was a brilliant dude (in addition to rockets he did some key research in the area of vacuum tubes- so he was working on computers and rockets!), he ran into two problems he simply wasn't able to solve: building a guidance system capable of controlling the rocket as winds etc. pushed on it, and building an engine that was strong and light enough to do what he wanted. That was why his best rocket got only about 9 miles high, rather than the 50 he was trying to reach. von Braun (and his VfR team) ran into exactly the same two problems- they were damn hard problems- but because WvB was a gifted team leader he went out and got others to solve the problems for him. He got expert metallurgists to design an engine, and electronics engineers to solve those problems for him. He understood how to build teams- for example, he built the most powerful supersonic wind tunnel in the world, even though the V2 was already designed before the wind tunnel was complete. But he knew that offering the chance to work with the best wind tunnel in the world would ensure that the best aerodynamics engineers would want to work with him, and they would solve his design for him, even before the actual tunnel was complete. That was why WvB built rockets that worked, while Goddard didn't, and why WvB had such a larger influence on others than Goddard. [1] Of course, team work can have downsides- sometimes you are on a team with nasty evil people. That's why Werner von Braun ended up a Sturmmbanfuehrer in the SS, because he was working for the Nazi's, and used concentration camp slave labor that was being worked to death to build his rockets. (It is estimated that more people died in Camp Dora being forced to build the V2- roughly 10,000- than from the rockets falling on them- roughly 7,000.) [1]: At one point some debris from a crashed V2 were shown to Goddard, and he jumped to the conclusion that fit his priors about everyone trying to steal from him: the German rocket used control vanes like he did, therefore they must have stolen it from him. The best English language expert on von Braun and Goddard, Michael Neufeld, does not believe that any such thing happened- the German team documented their work enough that it's pretty clear where their ideas came from, and it seems unlikely that Goddard allowed enough information to leak out. But that was where Goddard's mind naturally went- any sophisticated rocket idea must have been stolen from him.