Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Essay

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born Sept. 17, 1857, in Izhevskoye, Russia. He was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. At age ten he nearly became deaf from scarlet fever and had to quit school. He refused to be handicapped by his deafness and continued his education on his own at home. His family recognized his thirst for knowledge and sent him to Moscow to attend college. He was accomplished in both science and mathematics and became a teacher at Kaluga, Russia. Even as a teacher, Tsiolkovsky found time to learn.
Tsiolkovsky began to design airships, publishing his first work on the subject in 1892 and developing Russia's first wind tunnel. An 1894 article proposed the idea of a fully metal aircraft, and in 1895, he turned his eyes toward settling space.
In 1903, his manuscript "Exploration of the World Space with Reaction Machines" was published in Nauchnoe Obozrenie magazine. This and his follow-up articles are regarded as the world's first scientifically viable proposals to explore outer space with rockets. Tsiolkovsky's rockets were fuelled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the same mix used on the space shuttle, though hydrogen had only been liquefied for the first time in 1898.
His manuscript included the equation now named for the scientist. Tsiolkovsky's formula provides the mathematical relationship between the changing mass of a rocket as it burns through fuel, the velocity of the exhaust gases, and the final speed of the rocket. It is considered a foundation of astronautics.
But though Tsiolkovsky was the first to delve into such complex problems, his role as a provincial schoolteacher, combined with the shutdown of the magazine, meant that very few copies of his research left Russia. In the 1920s, German scientist Hermann Oberthand American physicist Robert Goddard were independently