A century ago, Robert Hutchings Goddard – a physics professor branded ‘Moon Man’ by the public and ridiculed by the press – launched the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket.

On 16 March 1926 it ascended 12.5 metres (41ft) into the air, reached 97 km/h (60mph) then bellyflopped into a cabbage patch.

But this odd apparatus was the progenitor of every future rocket. Goddard had realised liquid propellants were more efficient and controllable than solids. He patented designs for multi-stage rockets and liquid-fuelled rockets – both essential for later conquering space.

However, the conventional wisdom of the day regarded rockets not as serious science but glorified fireworks, and space travel as pure fantasy.

Goddard was roundly mocked, with one newspaper calling him, “a severe strain on credulity”. Goddard hit back. “Every vision is a joke,” he retorted, “until the first man accomplishes it.”

Goddard’s accomplishment proved as momentous to spaceflight as the Wright Brothers were to aviation. But only after his death did rocket engineers realise the immense debt they owed him. Today, Goddard is revered as a founding father of space rockets.

However, now the way we travel through space needs to change. Since the dawn of the Space Age, exploration of the cosmos has relied upon these chemical rockets which demand vast quantities of propellants to achieve sufficient velocities to escape our planet’s gravity.

The fastest object launched from Earth was NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which attained a departure velocity of 58,580 km/h (36,400 mph) on 19 January 2006. New Horizons then took 9.5 years to travel 4.7 billion km (2.9 billion miles) to reach Pluto.

The Moon can be reached in a few days, Mars in a few months and Jupiter in a few years. But to depart the Solar System and traverse interstellar space is a totally different proposition – the closest star, Proxima Centauri, would take 75,000 years and a prohibitively enormous amount of propellant to reach with current tech.

One hundred years on, new and evolving technologies stand ready to enable our next steps into space. Some, like Goddard’s first rocket, may strain credulity but could still happen in our lifetimes. Here are eight new propulsion methods that could transform the ways we explore the cosmos.

Read More: This is the radical new rocket tech that will put the whole solar system within humanity’s reach