Anyone who has studied the history of the space age has come across the name Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857–1935), often under the more common alternative spelling Tsiolkovsky. He is generally credited with the development of the basic mathematical formulae for space travel. Other than that, he is often described as the man who after the revolution inspired a small group of space enthusiasts, including Glushko and Korolev, to begin serious work on rocket technology. The details of his life, as James Andrews explains in his new study of the man, are more complex and far more interesting than the legend.
The details are interesting in and of their own right. Herman Oberth wrote to Tsiolkovskii in 1929: "I am sorry I did not hear about your work prior to now, or I may have been further along with my own analysis and discoveries." Certainly the paper the Russian wrote in 1903 on rockets fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen was far ahead of its time. His speculations about what would happen to the human body in weightlessness were equally prescient.