Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 – 1935)
I’m fairly Catholic in my reading but there is one genre that I can’t really get on with, science fiction. Perhaps it is my lack of imagination or just that I would prefer to spend my time understanding the range of emotions that make we humans tick or how we react to situations, comic or tragic.
I’m sure it is my loss.
But there are some whose imagination is stimulated by sci-fi and one such was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
The fifth child out of eighteen born to an impoverished Polish immigrant family in Russia, (cause and effect, I can’t help thinking), profoundly deaf after a childhood bout of scarlet fever and pretty much self-taught, Konstantin stumbled upon Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865.
Fascinated by the prospect of travel to the Earth’s nearest neighbour but being of a practical bent, he calculated that using a giant cannon to fire a spacecraft to the moon, Verne’s designated method, would generate forces that would kill the unfortunate passengers.
Verne did, though, light the blue touch paper that ignited Konstantin’s life-long interest in all matters aeronautical. He is reported to have remarked, “I do not remember how it got into my head to make the first calculations relating to the rocket. It seems to me the first seeds were planted by the famous fantasoeur, J Verne”.
Initially, he set his sights on flight, designing early airships and Russia’s first wind tunnel. He published his first work on the subject in 1892. In 1894, he wrote an article in which he proposed an aircraft made of metal. Surely the idea would never take off.
But the lure of space travel proved too great.
Konstantin tried his hand at writing science fiction but found that his mind wandered to trying to solve the practicalities of getting a rocket out of the Earth’s atmosphere and on its way to the moon. From 1895, this became his major preoccupation.
By 1903, Konstantin had cracked the problem, writing Explorations of the World Space with Reaction Machines, which was published in Russia’s scientific review, Nauchnoe Obozrenie. More articles were forthcoming from the prolific scientist. His rockets were to be fuelled by a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, precisely the same mix as was to be used by the Space Shuttle.
Astonishingly, hydrogen had only been liquefied for the first time by James Dewar in 1898.
Konstantin developed what later became to be known as the Tsiolkovsky Equation, which demonstrated the mathematical relationship between the change in the mass of a rocket as it burnt fuel, the speed of its exhaust gases, and the final velocity of the rocket. It became the bedrock that enabled the later development of astronautics.
Konstantin wasn’t done.
In 1929, he published an article in which he postulated that in order for a rocket to break out of orbit, it would need a series of rockets to drive it forward, each one breaking off from the main body of the craft as it had used up all of its fuel.
Who needed science fiction when you had Tsiolkovsky?
But hardly anyone outside of Russia had heard of his work. The Bolshevik revolution meant that very little hard information was coming out of the country. In any event, Konstantin was a lowly school teacher, who spent his spare time thinking about rocketry rather than a fully-fledged scientist attached to an acknowledged academic institution of standing. Moreover, the scientific journal he used to publish his articles was closed down.
There was no world-wide web to publicise his findings.
So, independently and in parallel during the 1920s, the German Hermann Oberthand and the American physicist, Robert Goddard, worked on many of the problems that had exercised Konstantin’s mind and often came up with the same conclusions as he had. All three could claim to be the fathers of rocketry, although Konstantin seemed to have got there first.
Full recognition of his genius only came posthumously. His work was drawn on and influenced the rocket designers, Valentin Glushko and Sergey Korolyov, as Russia strove to win the space race in the 1950s and early 1960s. The most prominent crater on the dark side of the moon bears Konstantin’s name as does asteroid 1590.
Tsiolkovsky was a great visionary. He wrote that “mankind will not forever remain on Earth, but in the pursuit of light and space will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere, and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space”.”
He was not wrong.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
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