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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian father of rocketry, was a self-educated man, but he developed insights into space travel and rocket science that are still in use over a hundred years later, earning him a place in history as one of the pioneers of astronautics.
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was the fifth of 18 children born to an impoverished Polish immigrant. At the age of 10, he developed scarlet fever, and lost a significant portion of his hearing, an ailment that isolated him from his peers. By the age of 14, he had been suspended from school, having acquired only a few brief years of formal education.But the young man had a thirst for learning. His father arranged for him to visit Moscow when Tsiolkovsky was 16, where he took advantage of the freely available Chertkovskaya Library. He studied mathematics, physics, chemistry and mechanics, and he also stumbled onto the works of science fiction writer Jules Verne, whose novels on space travel inspired him. Tsiolkovsky calculated that Verne's method of using a giant cannon to fire a spacecraft to the moon, utilized in his novel "From the Earth to the Moon," would generate acceleration forces that would kill its passengers.
Tsiolkovsky returned home after three years in Moscow, eventually taking the exam to qualify him as a teacher. Before taking his first teaching job, he built a centrifuge with the idea of testing gravitational effects. Local chickens served as his test subjects.
He taught arithmetic and geometry in the local school in Borokvsk, a small town 70 miles south of Moscow. There, he married Varvara Sokolova and raised a family. In 1892, Tsiolkovsky was promoted to another teaching position in Kaluga, where he would remain until his death in 1935.
Tsiolkovsky stated that he developed the theory of rocketry only as a supplement to philosophical research on the subject. He wrote more than 400 works including approximately 90 published pieces on space travel and related subjects. Among his works are designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship into the vacuum of space, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.
Tsiolkovsky's first scientific study dates back to 1880–1881. He wrote a paper called "Theory of Gases," in which he outlined the basis of the kinetic theory of gases, but after submitting it to the Russian Physico-Chemical Society (RPCS), he was informed that his discoveries had already been made 25 years earlier. Undaunted, he pressed ahead with his second work, "The Mechanics of the Animal Organism". It received favorable feedback, and Tsiolkovsky was made a member of the Society. Tsiolkovsky's main works after 1884 dealt with four major areas: the scientific rationale for the all-metal balloon (airship), streamlined airplanes and trains, hovercraft, and rockets for interplanetary travel.
In 1892, he was transferred to a new teaching post in Kaluga where he continued to experiment. During this period, Tsiolkovsky began working on a problem that would occupy much of his time during the coming years: an attempt to build an all-metal dirigible that could be expanded or shrunk in size.
Tsiolkovsky developed the first aerodynamics laboratory in Russia in his apartment. In 1897, he built the first Russian wind tunnel with an open test section and developed a method of experimentation using it. In 1900, with a grant from the Academy of Sciences, he made a survey using models of the simplest shapes and determined the drag coefficients of the sphere, flat plates, cylinders, cones, and other bodies. Tsiolkovsky's work in the field of aerodynamics was a source of ideas for Russian scientist Nikolay Zhukovsky, the father of modern aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. Tsiolkovsky described the airflow around bodies of different geometric shapes, but because the RPCS did not provide any financial support for this project, he was forced to pay for it largely out of his own pocket.
Tsiolkovsky studied the mechanics of lighter-than-air powered flying machines. He first proposed the idea of an all-metal dirigible and built a model of it. The first printed work on the airship was "A Controllable Metallic Balloon" (1892), in which he gave the scientific and technical rationale for the design of an airship with a metal sheath. Tsiolkovsky was not supported on the airship project, and the author was refused a grant to build the model. An appeal to the General Aviation Staff of the Russian army also had no success. In 1892, he turned to the new and unexplored field of heavier-than-air aircraft. Tsiolkovsky's idea was to build an airplane with a metal frame. In the article "An Airplane or a Birdlike (Aircraft) Flying Machine" (1894) are descriptions and drawings of a monoplane, which in its appearance and aerodynamics anticipated the design of aircraft that would be constructed 15 to 18 years later. In an Aviation Airplane, the wings have a thick profile with a rounded front edge and the fuselage is faired. But work on the airplane, as well as on the airship, did not receive recognition from the official representatives of Russian science, and Tsiolkovsky's further research had neither monetary nor moral support. In 1914, he displayed his models of all-metal dirigibles at the Aeronautics Congress in St. Petersburg but met with a lukewarm response.
Disappointed at this, Tsiolkovsky gave up on space and aeronautical problems with the onset of World War I and instead turned his attention to the problem of alleviating poverty. This occupied his time during the war years until the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Starting in 1896, Tsiolkovsky systematically studied the theory of motion of rocket apparatus. Thoughts on the use of the rocket principle in the cosmos were expressed by him as early as 1883, and a rigorous theory of rocket propulsion was developed in 1896. Tsiolkovsky derived the formula, which he called the "formula of aviation".
After writing out this equation, Tsiolkovsky recorded the date: 10 May 1897. In the same year, the formula for the motion of a body of variable mass was published in the thesis of the Russian mathematician I. V. Meshchersky ("Dynamics of a Point of Variable Mass," I. V. Meshchersky, St. Petersburg, 1897).
His most important work, published in May 1903, was Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices (Russian: Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами).Tsiolkovsky calculated, using the Tsiolkovsky equation, that the horizontal speed required for a minimal orbit around the Earth is 8,000 m/s (5 miles per second) and that this could be achieved by means of a multistage rocket fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. In the article "Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices", it was suggested for the first time that a rocket could perform space flight. In this article and its sequels (1911 and 1914), he developed some ideas of missiles and considered the use of liquid rocket engines.
The outward appearance of Tsiolkovsky's spacecraft design, published in 1903, was a basis for modern spaceship design. The design had a hull divided into three main sections. The pilot and copilot were in the first section, the second and third sections held the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen needed to fuel the spacecraft.
However, the result of the first publication was not what Tsiolkovsky expected. No foreign scientists appreciated his research, which today is a major scientific discipline. In 1911, he published the second part of the work "Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices". Here Tsiolkovsky evaluated the work needed to overcome the force of gravity, determined the speed needed to propel the device into the solar system ("escape velocity"), and examined calculation of flight time. The publication of this article made a splash in the scientific world, Tsiolkovsky found many friends among his fellow scientists.
In 1926–1929, Tsiolkovsky solved the practical problem regarding the role played by rocket fuel in getting to escape velocity and leaving the Earth. He showed that the final speed of the rocket depends on the rate of gas flowing from it and on how the weight of the fuel relates to the weight of the empty rocket.
Tsiolkovsky conceived a number of ideas that have been later used in rockets. They include: gas rudders (graphite) for controlling a rocket's flight and changing the trajectory of its center of mass, the use of components of the fuel to cool the outer shell of the spacecraft (during re-entry to Earth) and the walls of the combustion chamber and nozzle, a pump system for feeding the fuel components, the optimal descent trajectory of the spacecraft while returning from space, etc.[citation needed] In the field of rocket propellants, Tsiolkovsky studied a large number of different oxidizers and combustible fuels and recommended specific pairings: liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and oxygen with hydrocarbons. Tsiolkovsky did much fruitful work on the creation of the theory of jet aircraft, and invented his chart Gas Turbine Engine. In 1927, he published the theory and design of a train on an air cushion. He first proposed a "bottom of the retractable body" chassis. However, space flight and the airship were the main problems to which he devoted his life. Tsiolkovsky had been developing the idea of the hovercraft since 1921, publishing a fundamental paper on it in 1927, entitled "Air Resistance and the Express Train". In 1929, Tsiolkovsky proposed the construction of multistage rockets in his book Space Rocket Trains . Tsiolkovsky championed the idea of the diversity of life in the universe and was the first theorist and advocate of human spaceflight.
Tsiolkovsky never built a rocket; he apparently did not expect many of his theories to ever be implemented.
Hearing problems did not prevent the scientist from having a good understanding of music, as outlined in his work "The Origin of Music and Its Essence."
With the collapse of the USSR, a full and honest discussion of Tsiolkovsky’s legacy, began at last. Freedom of speech in the post-Soviet Russia inevitably gave rise to the opposite extreme of the Soviet propaganda -- the effort by some Russian authors to dethrone and vilify Tsiolkovsky and his legacy.
"Tsiolkovsky obviously had some wrong ideas, which were typical for his time — for example, the notion that nature has to be changed for human needs," Sergeeva says.
Post-Soviet publication of Tsiolkovsky's work also has brought to light his views on eugenics — specifically, his advocacy of the creation of a "better" human race. Despite his remarkable gifts for prediction, Tsiolkovsky could hardly foresee that just a few years after his death, the Nazi regime in Germany would use eugenics to justify the murder of millions. "Eugenics was not a big part of Tsiolkovsky’s philosophy; however he did have similar views," Sergeeva says.
Today, less then a mile from the scientist's home in Kaluga, sits the futuristic building of the State Museum of Cosmonautics. Symbolically, founded in 1961 by Yuri Gagarin, the museum was intended to popularize the exploration of space and promote Soviet advances in the field.
The creation of the museum, commemorating the Tsiolkovsky's legacy started immediately after the scientist's death in 1935. Lubov Tsiolkovskaya, the eldest daughter of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky made considerable effort to preserve the memory of her father. (165)
Some 400,000 people visited the museum every year during the 1980s. In the post-Soviet period, however, the number of visitors to Kaluga has plunged dramatically, as have the fortunes of the Russian space program. Government-sponsored tours to Kaluga were discontinued after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Sergeeva saw the statistics reverse at the end of the 1990s. More than 100,000 people have visited the museum in the last three years of the 20th century, and she saw more people coming on their own, by car or by train, rather than as part of official government tours.
Toward the end of his life Tsiolkovsky wrote, "My entire life consisted of musings, calculations, practical works and trials. Many questions remain unanswered, many works are incomplete or unpublished. The most important things still lie ahead."
As a child, Konstantin flew kites which led to his love of space flight. When he was ten, he became sick with scarlet fever which left him deaf.
