The Legacy of Tsiolkovsky

In Tsarist Russia, during the nineteenth century, there was a schoolteacher who dreamed of all-metal airplanes, of dirigibles, of people travelling to and living on other planets.

He put his dreams on paper. The documents he left were read by many.

The schoolteacher's name was Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Of course, his dreams were not merely fantasy. He had worked out the mathematical basis of rocket flight into space, including multi-stage designs, and he understood that liquid hydrogen and oxygen were the best propellants. He also published designs for metal airplanes that look much like those built fifty or sixty years later.

He himself built no hardware. That was at least partly because his ideas were too far ahead of his time; the Tsar's ministers (and later, the Politburo) saw no value in them and gave Tsiolkovsky no funding. But he had many disciples among the intelligentsia. The next generation of Soviet scientists would bring his dreams to life by building the families of rocket vehicles described here by Michael Stoiko.

SOVIET ROCKETRY: Past, Present, and Future

Michael Stoiko
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970

ISBN 0-03-081865-6

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