Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: The Father Of Rocketry

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was a Russian physicist and theoretical father of rocketry. The son of a Polish deportee to Siberia, Tsiolkovsky was an inventor and aviation engineer. He was also an insightful visionary. As early as 1894, he designed a monoplane which subsequently flew in 1915. He built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. In 1903, as part of a series of articles in a Russian aviation magazine, Tsiolkovsky published the rocket equation. In 1929, he published a theory of multistage rockets. Tsiolkovsky was also the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914) (452, 1). Famous quotes attributed to Tsiolkovsky are: "The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but mankind cannot stay

He self-started his education using his father’s library. He passed his examination in 1879 and was appointed an arithmetic and geometry teacher a year later (Ibid, 1). Self-educated, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a prolific writer. He had a very fertile mind. He was way ahead of his time. He also was not considered a member of the scientific establishment. This caused many to not recognize him or appreciate his works at the time. This was true in Russia or later the Soviet Union. He originated many fundamental ideas which were later recognized and used to fully develop later concepts that went beyond his works. Most of his work was not published until he died. He was relatively unknown in the West (Ibid, 2). In 1929, for example, he published an early postulation that multi-staged rockets would be needed to get to space. Also, included in the postulation was that to survive in space, man would need space suits, pressurized space stations and environmental controlled system as well to control or steer the rocket. He recognized the need for power that would be required to lift a rocket through the atmosphere, break the pull of gravity and achieve orbit. He claimed that no single rocket would have sufficient power to do it; a combination of rockets, linked together, would be required. He wrote an extended essay on free space where he described areas far from gravitational bodies (301,

With the fighting over in WWII, von Braun and his team, who had in effect defected to the US, were heavily interrogated and jealously protected from Russian agents. Whole V2s and V2 components were assembled and German rocket technicians were rounded up. In June, General Eisenhower sanctioned the final series of V2 launches in Europe. Watching each of the three V2s which rose from a launch site at Cuxhaven, was a Russian Army colonel, Sergei Korolev. Ten years later, Korolev would be hailed as the Soviet Union’s chief designer of spacecraft and the individual responsible for building the Vostok, Voshkod and Soyuz spacecraft which, since 1961, have carried all Soviet cosmonauts into orbit (309,