“Collected Works of K. E. Tsiokovskiy”
Academy of Sciences USSR 1954
NASA TT F-237, 1965, pp. 72-117
Document title: A.A. Blagonravov, Editor in Chief, Collected Works of K. E. Tiokovskiy, Vol- umeZZ- Reactive Flying Machines, Translation of “K.E. Tsiolkovskiy,Sobraniye Sochmeniy, Tom I- Reaktivnyye Letatal’nyye Apparaty,” Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Moscow, 1954,NASA l T F-237,1965,pp. 72-117.
Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy was a school teacher who lived in the small town of Kaluga, Russia. He is regarded by the Russians as the founder of Soviet rocketry, much as Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth are regarded as the fathers of American and German rocketry in their respective countries. He is responsible for associating the term Sputnik, or “fellow traveller,”to artificial satellites. But Tsiolkovskiy’s work was almost entirely theoretical and was not widely known or translated outside of Russia, until after his death.
This article, written in 1898 and first published in 1903, established the fundamentals of orbital mechanics and proposed the thenradical use of both liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as fuel. It appeared seventeen years before Goddard repeated much of the work in the United States and twenty-threeyears before he began the first experiments with liquid propellants. It was also the first detailed discussion of a manned space station. The fact that it was not translated until much later meant that its impact on rocket research around the world was minimal.
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