
He is memorialized with this statue at the bottom of the monument of the "Conquerors of Space" obelisk in Moscow. In the heart of Moscow, there exists a monument to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding scientist of. And while Goddard was American, Esnault-Pelterie was French, and Oberth was German, Tsiolkovsky lived his entire life in and around Moscow, Russia/USSR.

Perhaps more than any other person, Tsiolkovsky's early works influenced the development of spaceflight and space exploration across the globe. A few pioneers stand out in the history of the early 20th century: Robert Goddard, who created and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket Robert Esnault-Pelterie, who began designing airplanes and airplane engines but later moved on to rocketry, developing the idea of rocket maneuvering and Hermann Oberth, who built and launched rockets, rocket motors, liquid-fueled rockets, and mentored a young Wernher von Braun.īut before any of them came Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was the first to understand the relationship between consumable rocket fuel, mass, thrust, and acceleration. In the early days, all of these concerns were mulled over by theorists alone. Having to bring your own fuel on board is a severely limiting factor as far as the speed at which we can travel through intergalactic space.

portion of its fuel to create thrust can wind up traveling through the Universe. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is required to describe how fast a spacecraft that burns through a.
