Who will ever forget the Covid lockdowns of 20 and 21?
We nation of travelers suddenly found our horizons frustratingly foreshortened. However, even then, we were still free to look, if not outward, but upward.
We were free to gaze up to the moon and the planets and the stars and dream of how it would be to travel out there. Which is why I think, we could not help in that moment, to have our imaginations stirred by those two rival teams under Elon Musk and Richard Branson as they ventured beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, just as the rest of is hunkered down indoors, to help stem the spread of the Coronavirus!
We might roll our eyes at this way to spend billions, nonetheless we were buoyed by their daring and audacity. They showed that with enough motivation and money, amateurs – just like us – can venture as far as the edge of space!
In this spirit of admiration – I want to tell you about a remarkable man who was similarly inspired to reach for the stars more than a century earlier. Constantine Tsiolkovski was born in a village in Czarist Russia in 1857, the same decade our own Lawrence Hargrave was born in Britain. He came to be recognized as the father of astronautics and human spaceflight.
For me, perhaps the most striking aspect of this brilliant scientist’s career is the era in which he first developed his ideas. It was a vital period in the history of human travel. Late in the 19th century, Hargrave showed how his box kites could provide stable lift and then in 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright brought the world 59 seconds of controlled powered flight.
At the same time as these aviation pioneers were grappling with the practicalities of leaving the ground, Constantine Tsiolkovski was applying his considerable intellect to the physics of leaving the planet!
He was truly a giant among scientists and we’ve come to know him as precisely twice life size. Here at the Museum his likeness is one of three heroic busts lent to the museum by the Soviet Academy of Science in 1987 as part of an extensive exhibition promoting the Soviet space program.
Less than five years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the museum purchased the collection from Russia in 1996.
As well as Tsiolkovski, the best known of these three is Yuri Gagarin, the first human to travel in space, making a single orbit of the Earth, in April 1961 – less than a month before the first manned spaceflight by the US.
The third bust is of Sergei Korolev, who personally selected Yuri Gagarin. He was so strategically important to the Soviet space program that his identity was kept secret until after his untimely death in 1966.
To return to the achievements of Tsiolkovski. These are even more remarkable when we examine his life. He was one of no less than 18 children and had no formal education beyond the age of 10, when a near fatal attack of scarlet fever rendered him almost completely deaf and therefore unable to attend local school. Some suggest this was a blessing because it drove him to books to educate himself. His parents recognized his abilities and helped as best they could to send him to Moscow at the age of six where he spent his days in its greatest library, absorbing everything on science, mathematics, and philosophy.
What was considered Tsiolkovski’s most important work Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices was published in that seminal year for overcoming gravity, 1903. He first determined that the escape velocity from the Earth into orbit was 8-kilometres per second, and this could be achieved by using a multistage rocket fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
It was too early. He didn’t receive the recognition he hoped for from other scientists until later publications. Among his hundreds of works are concepts we might associate with the mid-20th century, designs for steerable rocket engines, 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.
While he was little known in the West, it is interesting to know that in fact he influenced both sides of what became known as the “Space Race”.
Clearly his influence on Russia space program was profound, despite his death in 1935, more than 20 years before his predictions were first realised.
There is evidence that the rocket scientist Werner von Braun also closely studied Tsiolkovski’s work when he led the German V2 ballistic missile program in World War Two and before he was recruited by the US to head up its space program.
For fans of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, Dark side of the Moon, consider that the Russians earned naming rights 20 odd years before it was released. When Lunar Three became the first spacecraft to photograph the unseen side of the Moon in 1959, they named the most prominent crater on the dark side of the moon after Constantine Tsiolkovski!
Written by volunteer Alan S.