Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

1857–1935, born in Izhevskoe, Russian Empire

Tsiolkovsky was probably the first person to realize the rocket was the means to travel into space, and the first to work out many essential principles. Deaf since childhood, he became a high school mathematics teacher. He theorized about airships and rockets beginning in the late 1800s and published his spaceflight ideas in Russian as early as 1903.

The communist government that emerged in Russia in 1917 eventually proclaimed Tsiolkovsky as the father of Soviet rocket technology.

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Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, born in Izhevskoe, Russia, in 1857, was the earliest theorist of spaceflight, publishing in 1903.

Tsiolkovsky's concept of drawing of a rocket that could take humans into space accounts for many aspects of human spaceflight.

Tsiolkovsky spent much of his life thinking about atmospheric flight. Later in life he began considering the idea of rocket flight in space.

A model of the Tsiolkovky-inspired spaceship that would take humans to the Moon in the 1936 Soviet movie, Cosmic Voyage.