KONSTANTIN TSIOLKOVSKY

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was a boy in Russia in the 1860s, before the time of communism. At the age of nine, he became ill with a disease called scarlet fever and, as a result, became partially deaf. His mother died a few years later, and young Tsiolkovsky had to do all his school work at home, but he en-
joyed studying, particularly math and science. At age 16, he visited a university in Moscow and lis- tened to lectures through an ear trumpet.
Tsiolkovsky became a teacher and continued to study physics and chemistry. He realized that liquid fuels released their energy more quickly than solid fuels, such as gunpowder, which were used in cannons and firecrackers. He also understood how the force of burning fuel shoots a rocket forward while the fuel itself is pushed backward. That means a rocket does not need air to hold it up, the way a balloon or a winged glider does.
Tsiolkovsky came up with the idea that a “rocket train” could be built in stages. Each stage
would fire until it ran out of fuel, pushing the entire train forward, and then dropping away until there was only one stage left, which would be traveling very fast. Before he died in 1935, Tsiolkovsky imagined that one day airlines would offer rocket trips from Moscow to Mars. He wrote that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live forever in a cradle.” Tsiolkovsky is called “the father of space travel.”