Goddard's early launches were made possible by a Smithsonian grant of $5000 by Charles Greeley Abbot from the Hodgkins fund. After being ridiculed in the NYT in 1920 he got more cautious about PR. After a Lindbergh visit, the Guggenheims helped him find another $100,000.
Germany didn't need 'help' from Goddard; they had Oberth, who did a PhD thesis on rocketry in 1922, and published The Rocket into Planetary Space in 1923. "Space historians typically name three pioneers as the founding fathers of astronautics: Tsiolkovsky [a Russian teachr when Goddard was still a teen], the American Robert Goddard, and the German (although Romanian-born) Hermann Oberth." [1]
[0] https://www.famousscientists.org/robert-goddard/ [1] https://www.airspacemag.com/space/russias-long-love-affair-w...
Is that true? I have read that, unlike the German rocket club, Goddard was very secretive — more like closed-source.
Thanks to the open German rocket club, they solved the engineering difficulty of a high speed pump to deliver fuel to the engines. Goddard appears to have stalled there.
So the U.S. gets the German scientists, some hardware. They seem to have wanted to have both a peaceful, scientific track for rocket research and a military one.
Werner got the military track with the Army. Developing, among other things, the Redstone.
The peaceful, scientific track became NASA when Sputnik circled the Earth. Failing to get their own JPL rockets off the ground, the U.S. turns to the Army .... hey, Werner, anything you can do with your Redstone to help us out here?
That's my take anyhow. Someone with deeper historical knowledge can correct my wild generalizations.