Who led the way to the stars?

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovski was born in Russia in 1857. He spent his life teaching in school and doing practical and theoretical research work in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. In 1883, long before the first aeroplane had been built, he began to consider the many different factors involved if man were to journey into space. In so doing, he developed an important theory – the theory of mass ratio: that is, the ratio between the mass of a rocket with its fuel and the mass of the rocket after the fuel has been used up. Tsiolkovski worked out the principle of staging in booster rockets, ad came to the conclusion that only a multi-stage rocket could overcome the pull of the earth’s gravity. His design for ‘a passenger rocker-train of the year 2017’ was over 90m long ad made up of twenty stages. He demonstrated that liquid propellants would be efficient rocket fuel.

Tsiolkovski’led the way of a star – but he did not live to see his dreams come true. He died in 1935.