Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Russian scientist

• Born: September 17, 1857
• Birthplace: Izhevskoye, Russia
• Died: September 19, 1935
• Place of death: Kaluga, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Tsiolkovsky was the first scientist to discover the mathematical theories of rocketry and astronautics on which modern space travel is based. Along with contemporary scientists Hermann Oberth of Germany and Robert Goddard of the United States, he pioneered the concepts of reaction propulsion as a means to lift a rocket into space, liquid-fueled rocket engines, and piloted space travel.

Early Life

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (kohn-stahn-TEEN tseel-KAWF-skee), a Russian schoolteacher who would become one of the founders of modern astronautics, was born in the rural town of Izhevskoye, Russia. Tsiolkovsky’s father, Eduard Ignatyevich Tsiolkovsky, a forester, was a dominant figure in Konstantin’s early life. The elder Tsiolkovsky’s passion for invention led him to design and build model homes and machines that significantly influenced his son’s interest in the inventive process. At the age of nine, Konstantin became ill with scarlet fever, which forced him into bed and into a process of disciplined self-study and experimentation that would be his primary means of education throughout his life. Using the books in his father’s library, Tsiolkovsky taught himself the fundamentals of literature, history, and the subjects that he found most interesting, mathematics and physics.

Konstantin’s passion for reading and study led him as a teenager to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an inventor. By the age of sixteen, he had designed and built a miniature model of a wind-driven horseless carriage, windmills, pumps, and a unique device for measuring heights and distances, among other things. Tsiolkovsky would use his skills as an inventor and a craftsman to build equipment and conduct experiments to prove the theorems he would study in books. It was this practice that led him to the development of the theories of reaction propulsion and astronautics that would later make him world-famous.

Also at sixteen, Tsiolkovsky’s father (his mother died when he was thirteen) sent him to Moscow to further his education. It was the elder Tsiolkovsky’s hope that Konstantin would be able to gain admission to the Moscow Technical School to allow him to become a teacher. Unfortunately, Tsiolkovsky was unable to gain admittance to the school and was forced to continue his self-study efforts, using the books in the Moscow Technical School’s library. Living on nothing but bread and water for months on end, Tsiolkovsky spent most of the meager allowance his father sent him on equipment and supplies for his experiments. Many of his experiments centered on designing new methods of construction of dirigibles, the airships of his day. One of his primary fascinations at this time, however, was the thought that humans could use the principles of physics to free themselves of gravity and move into the space beyond the atmosphere. His first unsuccessful experiment in this area left him shaken but emotionally challenged by the prospect of flight into space.

At the age of nineteen, Tsiolkovsky returned to his hometown to work as a tutor for young children in physics and mathematics. Two years later, he received a teaching certificate in arithmetic and geometry and was given a job as a teacher in Borovsk, in the Kaluga Province. He would live in Kaluga for the remainder of his life. In Kaluga, Tsiolkovsky continued to theorize and experiment in many areas of science. By the time he was twenty-four, the young schoolteacher had submitted a rudimentary technical paper to the St. Petersburg Society of Physics and Chemistry on the movement of gases. His second paper, which followed shortly after his first, gained for him full membership in the society his first official recognition as a scientist and theorist. This development set the stage for his later successes in rocketry and astronautics.

Life’s Work

In 1883, Tsiolkovsky came on the historic idea that one could use gases escaping from an opening in a pressurized chamber as a method of propelling an object through the air and, ultimately, through the airless, gravity-free void of interplanetary space. This theory, called reaction propulsion, uses Isaac Newton’s laws of motion by throwing off particles of matter to propel an object through space. Tsiolkovsky explained his theory by noting that opening a hole in a cask or barrel filled with pressurized gas would push the cask through space. The number of holes in the cask would regulate the flow of escaping gas and control the direction and speed of the cask’s movement through the air. Tsiolkovsky’s principle is also demonstrated by the way air released through the end of an inflated balloon causes the balloon to fly around a room.

By August, 1898, after years of experimentation into his theory, Tsiolkovsky had worked out the first mathematical formulas for the amount of thrust that would be necessary to lift objects into space and the speed at which the object would have to travel to develop the centrifugal force needed to balance the pull of Earth’s gravity and remain in orbit. The following year he received a grant from the Academy of Sciences that he used to develop and refine his theories through rudimentary experiments and exhaustive computations.

While Tsiolkovsky was in the process of developing his theories on space travel, he began writing popular stories of science fantasy and fact that captured the imagination of the reading public in Russia. His fiction and narrative fantasies helped him communicate his dream of piloted space exploration and the prospect of establishing colonies on other planets. These stories also helped the theorist to refine his scientific thought process and seek realistic applications for his theories. In 1903, Tsiolkovsky’s first article on rocket-powered spaceflight, entitled “Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi priborami” (exploration of space with reactive devices), was published in Naootchnoye Obozreniye (scientific journal). This short article is considered the seminal work in the fields of rocketry and orbital mechanics. It would also, as the years passed, gain for Tsiolkovsky much recognition as a scientist within the Western world and what would later be the Soviet Union.

In the article “Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi priborami,” Tsiolkovsky diagrammed his ideas for the construction of a rocket engine and the rocket it would power. Using liquid oxygen and hydrogen as fuels the same materials that would later be employed by Robert H. Goddard, Wernher von Braun, Sergei Korolev, and other practical developers of piloted and unpiloted launch vehicles Tsiolkovsky speculated that the mixing of the two substances in a narrow combustion chamber within the rocket would produce enough power through a nozzle at the rocket’s end to power it through space.

In his most famous article, and in later published works, Tsiolkovsky would be the first scientist to explore the concept of stacking several rockets on top of one another to produce the momentum necessary to move into Earth orbit and beyond the planet’s gravity. Tsiolkovsky developed this idea, the first multistage rocket, because his calculations showed him that a single-stage rocket would have to be of immense dimensions to place an object of any size into space. Tsiolkovsky’s theory was that, after the first rocket had used its fuel, a second stage would be able to use the momentum developed by the first to increase the vehicle’s speed to orbital, or escape, velocity. The second and later stages of the rocket would be succeedingly smaller, since less thrust would be required to push the vehicle as it got lighter after discarding each empty stage. Tsiolkovsky’s first piloted multistage design, called a passenger rocket train, included twenty rockets and was more than three hundred feet tall.

Two years after the Russian Revolution that brought Vladimir Ilich Lenin to power in what was now called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Tsiolkovsky was elected to membership in that nation’s premier scientific body, the Socialist Academy. This organization, the forerunner of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (later the Russian Academy of Sciences), was responsible for leading the development of scientific theory in the Soviet Union. Shortly after his election to the academy, Tsiolkovsky was given a pension to support his studies in Kaluga.

After his rise to fame, Tsiolkovsky became an icon for his contemporaries and for students of the budding science of rocket research. Hermann Oberth, who would later build on Tsiolkovsky’s theories and propose the first space-station design, began a substantial correspondence with the former schoolteacher. Korolev, who would later found the Soviet Union’s missile and space programs, would also build a relationship with Tsiolkovsky, whom Korolev considered his scientific mentor. During much of the period of his earliest space travel computations, Tsiolkovsky continued to teach at the children’s school in Kaluga. He had, it was said, a special rapport with the children he taught, and it is speculated that the young people’s own imaginations helped their teacher continue to expand his own.

Although he never actually built a rocket or launch vehicle of any kind to substantiate his theories, Tsiolkovsky continued to promote the potential values of space travel and to work for a greater public understanding of the laws of physics and nature behind them. He was a strong role model for many of the young men who founded, in the 1930’s, the first rocketry club in the Soviet Union, which built Russia’s first successful liquid-fueled rocket. Among the members of the group were Friedrich A. Tsander, the famous Soviet aircraft designer, and Korolev, the future chief designer of the Soviet space program.

At the age of seventy-eight, in September, 1935, only two days after his birthday, Tsiolkovsky, still considering himself a humble but visionary schoolteacher, died in his home in Kaluga. At the time of his death, he had authored more than sixty works of fiction, fantasy, and fact. Numerous tributes to him have been established in the years following his death, most particularly since the establishment of the Soviet space program in the late 1950’s.

Significance

The mathematical theories and formulas developed by Tsiolkovsky, coming as they did during the earliest days of aeronautic research, were part of a period of time in which one of the most rapid expansions of humankind’s attainable horizons was occurring. In a space of less than twenty years, humankind went from being virtually earthbound to having the capacity to move through the skies and, in quantifiable theory, beyond the atmosphere into interplanetary space. Tsiolkovsky’s studies essentially offered the blueprint for future reaction propulsion-powered travel by way of the rocket engine, the multistage rocket for launch vehicles and spacecraft, and the jet engine that would be used on modern aircraft. All major rocketry pioneers after Tsiolkovsky Goddard, Oberth, von Braun, and Korolev acknowledged him as the founder of their fledgling science.

Tsiolkovsky was also part of a long series of events that allowed for the expansion and reshaping of the understanding of science and the world. Tsiolkovsky’s popular writings showed the layperson the practical benefits of scientific endeavor, in much the same way that Jules Verne, Oberth, Isaac Asimov, and other scientists in the second half of the nineteenth century to modern times have done. He helped bring science, the study of the real world, and all the possibilities it holds into the frame of reference of laypersons.

Bibliography

Braun, Wernher von, and Frederick I. Ordway III. The History of Rocketry and Space Travel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966. This compendium on the early days of U.S. space efforts and the history of rocketry gives an excellent, easy-to-read narrative by one of the pioneers in space travel.

Chertock, Boris E. Rockets and People. Edited by Asif A. Siddiqi. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005-2006. An English translation of Chertock’s book about his experiences working on Soviet spacecraft.

Clark, Phillip. The Soviet Manned Space Program: An Illustrated History of the Men, the Missions, and the Spacecraft. New York: Orion Books, 1988. Clark is one of the acknowledged Western experts on the Soviet space program, and this is one of the most comprehensive books on the subject.

Daniloff, Nicholas. The Kremlin and the Cosmos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. This book, by a noted American journalist, gives an insightful look at the early days of the Soviet space program and how space research developed in the closed society of the Soviet Union.

Gruntman, Mike. Blazing the Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry. Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004. Includes information about Tsiolkovsky and other pioneers of rocketry.

Kosmodemianskii, Arkadii Aleksandrovich. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: His Life and Work. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956. This book, one of the very few English-language biographies available in the West, is a propagandist view of Tsiolkovsky’s life. It is interesting nevertheless and offers good information about his work.

Oberg, James E. Red Star in Orbit: The Inside Story of Soviet Failures and Triumphs in Space. New York: Random House, 1981. Oberg is one of the Western world’s leading experts on the Soviet space program. In this, his most famous book, he carefully details, in entertaining and informative language, the development of the cosmonauts’ march to space. Through his discussions of Tsiolkovsky, Korolev, and other leading space figures in the Soviet Union, the reader is given a panoramic yet very human view of one of the world’s two great space efforts.

Siddiqi, Asif A. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. An award-winning book that offers a comprehensive and detailed history of the Soviet space program. An essential resource.

Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin. Beyond the Planet Earth. New York: Pergamon Press, 1960. This English-language translation of one of Tsiolkovsky’s popular accounts of space travel is a fascinating look at the work of the founder of modern rocketry principles.

Zak, Anatoly. “Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Slept Here.” Air and Space Smithsonian 17, no. 3 (August/September, 2002): 62. Profile of Tsiolkovsky, summarizing his life and work, including his book, Plan for Space Exploration.