17 сентября 1857 года родился Константин Эдуардович Циолковский

A father of astronautics and an avid advocate of space exploration was born long before the space age and the car distribution. The last name and patronymic so rare for Russia came from the Polish background of his father, Eduard Ignatievich, who served at the state property office.

When he was a child, Tsiolkovsky had scarlatina and became almost deaf and lost the joy of talking to equals in age. He took all the joys from the books. And education — as he studied at home and libraries, he completed not only an elementary mathematics and physics course but also advanced algebra, analytical and spherical geometry. He then passed an examination without attending lectures to become a people’s teacher. Tsiolkovsky taught children and in his leisure time, he pursued science – chemistry, physics, and aerodynamics.

But Tsiolkovsky’s true passion was space. He is not without reason called the father of astronautics, as Tsiolkovsky’s ideas are the basis for the Russian rocket and missile engineering. He developed an equation bringing together the mass of a rocket and fuel and the speeds of the gases from the jet nozzle and from the rocket itself – Tsiolkovsky’s famous equation. He dated the page with his equation — 10 May 1897. From this date, we can safely count down the beginning of the space age in the human history.

Tsiolkovsky’s brilliant predictions came true – mankind left its cradle.

All his inventions and discoveries became a reality after his death — a multi-stage rocket, a liquid propellant jet engine, space stations. Tsiolkovsky predicted the laser and inexhaustibility of the atom, built a hot air balloon and proposed a full metal airship project, which fell on deaf ears at the Russian war ministry and eventually ended up in the hands of Graf von Zeppelin. He tried to get across his ideas to people and started writing science fiction.