How big do you think his dreams would ever be?
In rural Russia, where he lived, they didn’t even have the advantage of the latest technological achievements that were changing the western world, the railroad and the telegraph. His family’s lifestyle was the one that had sustained peasants for centuries, digging a living out of the earth by hand or with horse drawn plows! That is how everyone lived where he grew up. Even for the 19th century they were behind the times.
Now, how big do you think his dreams would ever be?
Worse, at the age of 9 he contracted scarlet fever. He survived but was struck down with profound deafness from which he would suffer throughout his entire life. As a boy, this led to his having to drop out of school and also kept him from developing social skills. He became withdrawn. But he developed into an avid reader and became determined not to let his handicap hold him back. Reading Jules Verne’s novels about space flight fired his imagination. He persisted and became largely self educated. Later he was allowed to audit lectures on science at Moscow University using an ear horn he had designed himself. When in his twenties, he became a rural schoolteacher teaching mathematics. That is as high as anyone could expect a poor, handicapped person to rise in a backwards area of underdeveloped Russia.
Again, how big do you think he would ever dream?
And what chance would he have of having his dreams come true?
Would you believe he would become a great scientist…. a mad scientist!?
However, here the word “Mad” translates to “Genius ahead of his time.”
You see, amidst all this he dreamed and wrote about the exploration and colonization of space. While still teaching school, he began his self-education on space travel and, in 1883 at the age of 26, published his first paper entitled “Free Space.”
If you realize that he was talking about space flight to people living in the horse-drawn agricultural society of the 1880s you can better understand the adjective, ‘mad.’
In the beginning, no one would have given this reclusive, withdrawn rural schoolteacher's dreams any credit. And what he dreamt, spoke, and wrote about should have gotten him committed.
However, in spite of all this, he correctly identified and solved most of the basic major problems associated with spaceships and spaceflight. He was the first person to derive the essential rocket equation (known in Russia today as the ‘Tsiolkovsky equation’). He first published those problems and their solutions in 1903 and continued evolving his theories and techniques.
Although his earlier paper had the first sketch of a rocket powered spaceship—the very first ever seen, his 1903 paper, had a more thorough solution titled, Rocket #1. This was the first rocket designed to carry a human being into space. But he continued to improve Rocket #1. He built the first wind tunnel ever created and tested several models in it. By 1914, he had designed an improved model and displayed his new version as Rocket #2 at the Moscow Convention on Space and Rockets.
Still life was not easy for this ‘mad’ scientist. His son committed suicide in 1902, his daughter and later himself was arrested for political reasons. He almost lost all his life’s research in a flood. But in spite of it all, he persisted to promote the science of air and spaceflight in his studies and his publications. Released from prison his work was later recognized by the Soviet government when other European scientist’s writings about rockets became known. He was granted a pension in the late 1920s and by the time of his death in 1935, he was being hailed as “the father of Cosmonautics” in Russia.
If you look at what he had to go through in order to pursue his dreams it is amazing. T. E. Tsiolkovsky showed future generations that the way you make your dreams come true is to study nature to see how to make them work, plan them thoroughly and persist. And by so doing he created and modeled, almost a decade before anyone else, the first spaceship.
So the rocketship that is given the honor of Docking Bay #1 is his Rocket # 2 because, it was
The very first model Spaceship!
Rocket #2 1914 at the Moscow Exhibit.
He is, with little argument, the inventor of the Spaceship as a Rocketship.
Every great big, mad invention needs a ‘mad’ scientist…and the spaceship had one! I present to you the greatest dreamer of the 19th century,
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle". - (Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky-Kaluga,1911. From a letter.)
Links to Additional information available in the Trade Zone.
A Design Drawing--------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Complete background information is available in the Spaceship Handbook
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Spaceship # 2 is also found in “Ad Astra per Aspera” in the lower left hand corner.
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