Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

А hypothetical sputnik, similar to our Moon but nearer to our planet, could orbit at about 300 versts (270 km) free of Earth’s gravity.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Dreams of Earth and sky, 1895.

Russia’s exploration of space began in а small village called Izhevskoye near the city of Ryazan, 200 km southeast of Moscow. On 17 September 1857 a small boy was born. His father, Eduard Tsiolkovsky, was a forest ranger and he named his son Konstantin.

He was a bright, active child until he was ten, when one disaster followed another. He was struck down by scarlet fever and he became almost totally deaf. For three years his mother nursed him and despite his affliction taught him to read and write and manage at boys’ high school. Then, when he had reached thirteen, she died suddenly. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s life is the story not only of one man’s effort to cope with a terrible disablement. For despite it he became a self-taught scientist, а practical person and a theoretician of space flight. He was the one person who inspired the idea of a Russian space programme from the very beginning. Without him, it might never have happened at all.

By the age of 14, Tsiolkovsky was well able to read, and he read books endlessly. It was one thing he was able to do, deprived as he was of the normal channels of human contact and communication. Financially supported by his father, he moved to Moscow when he was 16, rented rooms, and spent day after day in the city’s public libraries. By 17 he had begun to master higher mathematics, differential calculus and spherical trigonometry. After three years in Moscow, Tsiolkovsky took up a teaching post in Kaluga, a town south-west of Moscow. In the Tsar’s Russia it was probably the most obvious career for him. His

life was hard and he found deafness а terrible torment. He even designed tin funnels as hearing aids so he could try pick up what people were saying.

In 1883, in the course of the long summer school holidays, Tsiolkovsky turned his mind to something which had obsessed him—travel through space. We do not know where the inspiration came from and history gives us no clue. It may have been his deafness which, while depriving him in so many other ways, made him contemplative and all the more imaginative.

“Free space”^[1], his book from 1883, took the creative leap from the earth-bound solid practical world to that of fantasy, yet without cutting scientific corners. He described what a human being would see and experience if flying around the Earth in a space ship. He would be weightless; and he would get up there by a ‘reactive’ interplanetary ship with a rocket engine using spherical projectiles fired by an on-board cannon. Gravity and weightlessness intrigued Tsiolkovsky. He rigged up devices that could create zero-gravity on the ground and a primitive centrifuge to test overloading, which he verified using chicken and mice. They could stand loads of six gravities (6 g) but died at much higher g—just like humans would.

“Free space” was followed by “On the Moon” ^[2](1887) and “Dreams of Earth and sky” ^[3](1895). In the last-mentioned he described how a small moon or artificial Earth satellite could be launched and circle the Earth at an altitude of 270 km. It would be a mistake to regard Tsiolkovsky as simply a Russian equivalent of the French novelist Jules Verne, inspired by him though he was. He was also an inventor. He designed and built a wind tunnel in his home to study air resistance; and he designed a monoplane with a gasoline engine, enclosed cockpit, autopilot and retractable landing gear.

In 1903, Tsiolkovsky, in Kaluga, produced his most important paper ‘Exploring space with reactive devices’^[4]. In it he spelt out the advantages of rocket flight and of liquid-fuelled rockets; and he explained how it might be possible to soft-land on other planets. Eventually, he predicted, poetically, ‘people will ascend into the expanse of the heavens and found a settlement there’.

His ideas gained ground and won gradual acceptance. Papers were taken by the Petrograd journal ‘Scientific Review’ (1911). By then his mind had moved on. In the same year he proposed that, due to the possible inefficiency of liquid-fuelled rockets, some kind of atomic power would have to be considered for really distant space journeys!

Tsiolkovsky found some form of financial security when in 1918 the new revolutionary government awarded him a life pension. He continued writing, to produce in 1924 ‘Cosmic rocket trains’^[5], advocating multi-stage rockets in which one used the thrust gained by a lower stage to fly to ever greater altitudes. He then designed a ‘stellar ship’, complete with closed ecocycle to resupply itself with air, plants and water. His spaceship designs would be considered conventional enough today in any technical journal dealing with future space travel: but liquid-fuelled engines, solar batteries, wheel-shaped space stations, these were all part of his thinking seventy years ago. In the same year the government republished all his old works.

In his later days, his home in Kaluga became a place of pilgrimage. Inventors, designers, journalists, aviators, and scientists beat their path to Tsiolkovsky’s door. The now old, bearded, hollow-chested prophet lived in a two-storey house with a large veranda, where he sat out to reflect the summer. Books, manuscripts, and the odd globe were piled in his study.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s health gave way in August 1935. Newspapers carried accounts of his collapse and his subsequent death in September 1935. His home was at once turned into a national museum and since then it has been a shrine and a tourist attraction. An obelisk has been erected, as has a shining 20 м high silvery rocket against a bronze bust of his figure. In 1954 the Tsiolkovsky Gold Medal was struck, to be awarded every three year to the most outstanding contributor to space flight.