Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (17 September 1857 - 19 September 1935) was a Russian and Soviet aerospace engineer and astronautics visionary.
Personal Life
Spending most of his life in a log cabin hundreds of miles outside of Moscow, Tsiolkovsky was inspired at an early age by stories of fictional works about space travel. Taking to the art himself, he began to write science fiction for some time until his interest pushed him out of writing fiction and into writing research papers.
Though criticized by his peers for researching ideas that were trivial and out of reach at the time, he persevered and managed to pave the road for the future of rocketry, mainly in the later parts of the 20th century.
Scientific Contributions
In 1896, Tsiolkovsky discovered his, "formula of aviation," which linked a change in a rocket's speed, the specific impulse of an engine, and the initial and final masses of the rocket.
- [math]\displaystyle{ \delta V=I_0 \ln\left( {M_0\over M_1} \right) }[/math]
In 1903, Tsiolkovsky authored arguably his most important work: the Tsiolkovsky Equation, which finds the speed necessary to obtain sustainable orbit around the earth. This discovery proved that spaceflight was actually possible, possibly through use of multistage rocket.
Impact
Despite the importance Tsiolkovsky found in these discoveries, his foreign colleagues largely disregarded his works at the time. His support for eugenics in the 1920's greatly hurt his standing with the public and later died in 1935 during a stomach cancer operation. Though dismissed for many years, the rise of the German V2 program, and later the U.S. Apollo Program, were largely paved by the discoveries made by Tsiolkovsky around the turn of the 20th century.
References
1. [1]
2. [2]
3. The life of Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky 1857–1935. Informatics.org (19 September 1935). Retrieved 4 May 2012.