Robert Goddard spent the early twentieth century building and testing liquid-fueled rockets while much of the scientific establishment dismissed the idea as fantasy, and this NASA production tells his story through the voice of his widow. Esther Goddard narrates the reminiscences on camera, walking through their life together and the long stretch of ridicule, funding trouble, and technical failure that came before any success. Historic footage carries the other half of the film: grainy black-and-white shots of Goddard's early test stands and launches in Massachusetts and later New Mexico, the same experiments that laid the groundwork for the rockets that would eventually leave Earth's atmosphere. There is no narrator standing between the viewer and these two sources, just Mrs. Goddard's recollections cut against the archival record of what her husband actually built. The film stays close to its two witnesses, the widow and the film canister, and lets them make the case that Goddard's dream, dismissed in his own lifetime, turned out to be correct.