Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — Age & Birthday

Editor's Take:

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.