Rockets had been used on the battlefield for hundreds of years before Konstantin Tsiolkovsky dreamed of the possibility of space flight.
Rockets had been used on the battlefield for hundreds of years before Konstantin Tsiolkovsky dreamed of the possibility of space flight.
But in working out how they could thrust people upwards, above Earth’s atmosphere and off to other planets, he was decades ahead of his time.
Rockets are pushed forwards by gases escaping from the back at high speed.
In rockets used on the battlefield and in space travel, these gases are the result of rapid burning of fuel.
The earliest rockets were fire arrows used in China in the 11th century, and although early rockets were very inaccurate they were commonplace in battles in Europe from the 14th century.
English inventor William Congreve (1772–1828) created a more accurate battlefield rocket in the early 19th century, with an improved launcher and a long stick for guidance.
Another English inventor, William Hale (1797–1870), made war rockets much more accurate in 1844 by making them spin as they flew.
Thanks to advances in astronomy, people in the 19th century had a reasonable knowledge of the stars and planets, and the enormous distances between them and Earth.
Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a partially deaf Russian maths teacher, was fascinated by it all.
He was the first person to suggest humans might one day populate the rest of the solar system and beyond.
Long before the technology existed to make any of it possible, Tsiolkovsky immersed himself in the technical details of space flight, including multi-stage rockets, space stations and airlocks for leaving spacecraft to go on space walks.
He correctly worked out that a rocket would need to travel at 8 kilometres per second (18,000 mph) to escape Earth’s atmosphere and realised that liquid fuel, rather than solid, was the likely way to achieve it.
Tsiolkovsky is, however, most unlikely to have made the pages of The Sun or its 1903 equivalent since it was decades before his ideas were published outside the then Soviet Union, where he was held in great esteem, receiving a state funeral in 1935.
Unaware of Tsiolkovsky’s ideas, American Robert Goddard (1882–1945) became the first person to experiment practically with liquid fuel rockets.
He succeeded in 1926 with a flight that lasted a few seconds and only climbed to 13 metres (15 yards).
From this humble beginning, Goddard developed faster, more powerful rockets with guidance systems, and which rose about 1.6 kilometres (1 mile).
In 1923 an Austrian scientist called Hermann Oberth (1894–1989) published By Rocket Into Interplanetary Space.
This book inspired enthusiasts including Wernher von Braun to experiment with liquid-fuelled rockets.
Von Braun went on to work for the German army and led development of the V-2 rockets, thousands of which were fired from occupied Europe at England during World War Two.
At the end of the war, German rocket specialists and unused equipment fell into Allied hands. They then formed the basis of fledgling postwar space programmes in Russia and the USA.
The Russians eventually won the race to put the first man into orbit.
He was Yuri Gagarin, sent up in 1961 by a team of engineers and designers inspired by more than 500 scientific papers written by space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
