Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

63
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky bigraphy, stories - Russian aerospace engineer

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky : biography

17 September 1857 – 19 September 1935

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (5 September (17 September) 185719 September 1935) was a Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory. Along with his followers, the German Hermann Oberth and the American Robert H. Goddard, he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics.. From San Diego Aerospace Museum Educational Materials His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers such as Sergey Korolyov and Valentin Glushko and contributed to the success of the Soviet space program.

Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about southwest of Moscow. A recluse by nature, he appeared strange and bizarre to his fellow townsfolk.

Tributes

Draft first space ship by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

  • The State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga now bears his name.
  • The crater Tsiolkovskiy (the most prominent crater on the far side of the Moon) was named after him, while asteroid 1590 Tsiolkovskaja was named after his wife. (The Soviet Union obtained naming rights by operating Luna 3, the first space device to successfully transmit images of the side of the moon not seen from Earth.. Nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov. Retrieved 4 May 2012.)
  • There is a statue of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky directly outside the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
  • There is a Google Doodle honoring the famous pioneer.

Works

  • (English) Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin E.,
  • (Russian) Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin E.,

Scientific achievements

This section has recently been partly machine translated from the Russian article. Please supply an improved translation if possible.

Monument to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Moscow]] Tsiolkovsky stated that he developed the theory of rocketry only as a supplement to philosophical research on the subject.http://epizodsspace.testpilot.ru/bibl/ziv/2003/tsiolk.html He wrote more than 400 works, most of which are little known to the general reader because of their questionable value.

During his lifetime he published approximately 90 works on space travel and related subjects. on russianspaceweb.com Among his works are designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship into the vacuum of space, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.

Tsiolkovsky’s first scientific study dates to the year 1880–1881. He wrote a paper called "Theory of Gases," in which he outlined the basis of the kinetic theory of gases, but after submitting it to the Russian Physico-Chemical Society (RPCS), he was informed that his discoveries had already been made 25 years earlier. Undaunted, he pressed ahead with his second work, "The Mechanics of the Animal Organism". It received favorable feedback, and Tsiolkovsky was inducted into the Society. Tsiolkovsky’s main works after 1884 dealt with four major areas: the scientific rationale for the all-metal balloon (airship), streamlined airplanes and trains, hovercraft, and rockets for interplanetary travel.

In 1892, he was transferred to a new teaching post in Kaluga where he continued to experiment. During this period, Tsiolkovsky began working on a problem that would occupy much of his time during the coming years: an attempt to build an all-metal dirigible that could be expanded or shrunk in size.

Tsiolkovsky developed the first aerodynamics laboratory in Russia in his apartment. In 1897, he built the first Russian wind tunnel with an open test section and developed a method of experimentation using it. In 1900, with a grant from the Academy of Sciences, he made a survey using models of the simplest shapes and determined the drag coefficients of the sphere, flat plates, cylinders, cones, and other bodies. Tsiolkovsky’s work in the field of aerodynamics was a source of ideas for Russian scientist Nikolay Zhukovsky, the father of modern aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. Tsiolkovsky described the airflow around bodies of different geometric shapes, but because the RPCS did not provide any financial support for this project, he was forced to pay for it largely out of his own pocket.