The preservation idea, born in Yellowstone, spread around the world. Scores of nations have preserved areas of natural beauty and historical worth so that all mankind will have the opportunity to reflect on their natural and cultural heritage, and to return to nature and be spiritually reborn in it. Of all the benefits from Yellowstone National Park, this may be the greatest.

More famous in his day than Einstein or Edison, the troubled, solitary genius Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) was the American father of rocketry and space flight, launching the world's first liquid-fuel rockets and the first powered vehicles to break the sound barrier. Supported by Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim, through fiery, often explosive, experiments at Roswell, New Mexico, he invented the methods that carried men to the moon. Today, no rocket or jet plane can fly without using his inventions.

Yet he is the "forgotten man" of the space age. His own government ignored...