Buckethead at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy has written a neat mini-history of the Russian contribution to the space age. Not a lot of people know that…
The space age began with Tsiolkovsky, a school teacher in Tsarist Russia. His theoretical work moved thinking on space flight from the realm of fantasy- Hale’s story Brick Moon, the works of Jules Verne, etc.- to rigorous mathematical theory…
Though Tsiolkovsky was doomed to obscurity, this visionary saw in its entirety the whole future of man in space- not merely the dream of space flight, but how it would be achieved. And he wrote the earliest of his papers before the first heavier than air flight!
I certainly didn’t.
Read the rest of the article for a warning to America that, despite the end of the USSR, the space race ain’t over yet…
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