Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a deaf village teacher. He worked out the basic science of spaceflight decades before anyone could build a rocket. His equation linking speed, fuel and mass is still taught to engineers. He imagined space stations and multi-stage rockets. Few took him seriously during his lifetime. Soviet rocket builders later treated him as a founding father. He also wrote science fiction to share his ideas with the public. The Soviet space programme honoured him with monuments and a crater on the Moon.
Key Milestones
1892: Settles in Kaluga as a teacher
1897: Derives the rocket equation
1903: Publishes his paper on rockets in space
1929: Describes multi-stage rockets
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian: Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский Russian pronunciation:; 17 September 1857 – 19 September 1935) was a Russian rocket scientist who pioneered astronautics. Along with Hermann Oberth and Robert H.
