September 17, 1857
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born into a modest noble family in the Ryazan village of Izhevskoye. He was a self-taught scientist, the inventor of the multistage rocket and orbital stations, and a founder of cosmonautics.
Humanity will not remain on Earth forever, but in pursuit of light and space, it will first timidly penetrate beyond the atmosphere, and then conquer all of the near-solar space.
His parents called him "Bird" because he loved to climb trees, was inattentive in class, and was constantly daydreaming. At age nine, he contracted scarlet fever. Due to severe complications, he became almost completely deaf, fell behind in his studies, and dropped out of high school.
Having lost the opportunity to interact with others as he normally did, he became fascinated with scientific literature. As a teenager, he built models of windmills and self-propelled carriages, learned to operate a lathe, and began to consider building a hot air balloon.
At 22, he built the world's first centrifugal machine—the precursor to modern centrifuges. Through experiments with it, he demonstrated that the weight of an ordinary cockroach can increase 300-fold under increasing G-forces.
He spent most of his life in KalugaTo support his family and buy books, he taught in district schools and worked part-time as a tutor.
He spent all his free time in the workshop, where he worked on drawings of an all-metal airship and a “bird-like flying machine,” which became the prototype of the modern aircraft.
Here he built a wind tunnel, which helped him study the laws of flight at low speeds and become one of the founders of a new science – experimental aerodynamics.
As early as May 1897, he developed a formula for space rocket flight. Later, he substantiated the feasibility of interplanetary travel, invented the design of a gas turbine engine, and developed a theory of jet aircraft flight.
He died in 1935 of stomach cancer, at the age of 78. Fifty thousand people attended his funeral—almost all the residents of Kaluga, who 30 years earlier had declared Tsiolkovsky "indulgent in trifles" and "empty fantasies."
