The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

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Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky
(1857–1935)
ARussian physicist and school teacher, regarded as
the founder of modern rocket theory. Born in the
small town of Izhevskoye almost exactly 100 years
before his country placed the world’s first artificial
satellite in orbit, Tsiolkovsky developed the mathematics
of rocketry and pioneered a number of ideas
crucial to space travel, including that of multistage
launch vehicles. He later recalled:
For a long time I thought of the rocket as everybody
else did—just as a means of diversion and of
petty everyday uses. I do not remember exactly
what prompted me to make calculations of its
motions. Probably the first seeds of the idea were
sown by that great fantastic author Jules Verne—
he directed my thought along certain channels,
then came a desire, and after that, the work of the
mind.
At age nine, Tsiolkovsky went deaf following a bout of
scarlet fever—an event that prevented him from
attending school but led him to become an avid
reader. An early interest in flight and model balloons
was encouraged by his parents. His mother died when
he was 13 and his father was poor, but he taught himself
mathematics and went to technical college in
Moscow. There he found an enlightened mentor
named Nikolai Fyodorov (whose admirers were said
to include Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Leonid Pasternak,
Boris’s father). Fyodorov tutored the young
Tsiolkovsky in the library daily for some three years,
introducing him to books on mathematics and science
and discoursing with him on the philosophical
imperative leading humankind toward space exploration.
In 1878, Tsiolkovsky became a math teacher in
Kaluga, two hours south of the capital. Although he
carried out some experiments with steam engines,
pumps, and fans in his home laboratory, his strength
lay in theoretical work. “It was calculation that
directed my thought and my imagination,” he wrote.
In 1898, he derived the basic formula that determines
how rockets perform—the rocket equation. This formula
was first published in 1903, a few months before
the Wright brothers’ historic manned flight. It
appeared, together with many other of Tsilokovsky’s
seminal ideas on spaceflight, in an article called
“Investigating Space with Rocket Devices,” 293 in the
Russian journal Nauchnoye Obozreniye (Science Review).
Unfortunately, the same issue also ran a political revolutionary
piece that led to its confiscation by the
Tsarist authorities. Since none of Tsiolkovsky’s subsequent
writings were widely circulated at the time (he
paid for their publication himself out of his meager
teacher’s wage), it was many years before news of his
work spread to the West.
The 1903 article also discussed different combinations
of rocket propellants and how they could be
used to power a manned spacecraft:
Visualize ...an elongated metal chamber ...
designed to protect not only the various physical
instruments but also a human pilot. ... The
chamber is partly occupied by a large store of
substances which, on being mixed, immediately
form an explosive mass. This mixture, on exploding
in a controlled and fairly uniform manner at
a chosen point, flows in the form of hot gases
through tubes with flared ends, shaped like a cornucopia
or a trumpet. These tubes are arranged
lengthwise along the walls of the chamber. At the
narrow end of the tube the explosives are mixed:
this is where the dense, burning gases are
obtained. After undergoing intensive rarefaction
and cooling, the gases explode outward into
space at a tremendous relative velocity at the
other, flared end of the tube. Clearly, under definite
conditions, such a projectile will ascend like
a rocket...
One of the propellant combinations that Tsiolkovsky
favored, used commonly today in launch vehicles,
was liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen because it
produces a particularly high exhaust velocity. This
factor, the rocket equation reveals, helps determine
the maximum speed that a spacecraft of given mass
can reach. There was the problem of converting
hydrogen, especially, into liquid; yet, to begin with,
Tsiolkovsky brushed this aside. He did note, however,
that: “The hydrogen may be replaced by a liquid or