Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

In 1895 a provincial mathematics teacher published a work of science fiction that discussed artificial satellites. In it he suggested that a station built by people could spin to give its crew a kind of gravity. The teacher was Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky.

Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17, 1857, in the village of Izhevskoye, in Ryazan province, Russia. Scarlet fever took much of his hearing when he was a boy; sources give his age as nine or ten. From about fourteen he taught himself from books. From 1873 to 1876 he lived in Moscow, reading in its libraries and studying chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics. He qualified as a schoolteacher in 1879 (some sources say 1878), taught in Borovsk from 1880, and moved to Kaluga in 1892. He stayed there for the rest of his life.

In his spare time he wrote about flight. In 1883 he wrote Free Space, a study of life without weight that was not printed in his lifetime. In 1898 he sent a journal an article on exploring space with rocket devices; it was printed in 1903. In it he showed how a rocket's speed depends on how fast its exhaust gases escape. In the 1920s and 1930s he published ten major works. Across his writings he discussed multistage rockets, liquid hydrogen and oxygen as fuels, orbital space stations, and suits for working outside a spacecraft. He never built a working rocket.

He also kept writing fiction. He began his novel Beyond the Earth on November 28, 1896, and finished it in 1917; it was printed at Kaluga in 1920. Greenhouses in Orbit, in Hearth Library, gives three of its chapters. Twenty travelers circle the earth. When their stores begin to run low, they build a long glass greenhouse beside the rocket. Their waste feeds the plants, and the plants give them food and oxygen. To visit the greenhouse they wear space suits, because its thin air is fit only for plants.

After the revolution of 1917 the Soviet state honored his work. In 1921 it gave him a lifetime pension, and he retired from teaching. He died at his home in Kaluga on September 19, 1935. In the 1950s and 1960s Americans studied his writings closely as they tried to understand early Soviet success in space. Alongside rockets, his writings dealt again and again with air, food, and daily life in orbit.