"All my life I was blazed in the flame of my ideas.
I considered all the rest was very unimportant". (Tsiolkovsky-March
5,1933. From a letter).
As early as 1894, Tsiolkovsky designed a monoplane which flew in 1915.
He built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897.
In 1903, as part of a series of articles in a Russian aviation magazine,
Tsiolkovsky published the Rocket Equation, proving the possibility of rocket
flight into space.
In 1929, he published the theory of multistage rockets.
Tsiolkovsky was interested in the theories of space flight, but he
never built a rocket or motor himself.
In December, 1996, U.S. Astronaut John Blaha, aboard the Russian space
station MIR, harvested the first wheat crop completely grown in space,
thus fulfilling Step 9 of his 16 step
plan for the first time.
Sputnik, the first artifical Earth satellite, was launched on October
4, 1957, just after the100 th aniversary of his birthday, in honor of Tsiolkovsky.
The largest crater on the far side of the Moon is named after Tsiolkovsky.
It was discovered when the Luna 3 satellite took the first photographs
on the far side on October 7, 1959. The crater is centered near 129 degrees
east longitude and 21 degrees south latitude. It is 240 Km (160 miles)
across with a central peak 40 Km (25 miles long). Click
here for a photo taken by the U.S. Lunar Orbiter 3 in 1967. Click here
for a photo taken by Apollo 8 in 1968. Click here
or here
to see photos of the crater taken from Apollo 15 in 1971. You can also
visit the Clementine
satellite browser for recent satellite images of the Moon.
In "Star Trek, The Next Generation" there is a spaceship
named Tsiolkovsky (Oberth class Scientific
Vessel NCC-53911). Click here for a large
color photo.
Ten nations have have honored Tsiolkovsky with
postage stamps showing his portrait and drawings.
