Text g tsiolkovsky's dream nears realization

The young man spent hours over ideas he had put down in a schoolboy's note-book. In a home-made machine he made lots of experiments to see how living things withstood the effects of gravity and acceleration. The date was 1879, in the small Russian village near Ryazan. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was 22, waiting for a post of a schoolmaster.

The problem at which he worked was interplanetary travel. Though Tsiolkovsky soon began a long career as a teacher of mathematics, man's penetration into space remained his life-long study.

In 1883 he noted that the rocket would be the only man-made instrument able to reach space. The prediction was published only in 1954, when his collected works were printed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The mathematical terms of space travel were worked out by Tsiolkovsky as early as 1895 in a manuscript "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Reaction-Propelled Appa­ratus". When it was published in 1903, Tsiolkovsky won immediate international recognition, especially among the pioneers of aviation science.

Tsarist Russia had no research money for the modest school-teacher of Kaluga, and to get money for his re­searches Tsiolkovsky tried to publish his book "Outside the Earth" in 1916, in which he described the imaginary flight of a manned rocket ship in orbit about the earth.

It was only in 1920 that the book was published and it fired the imagination of other scientists in our country; as well as abroad. In 1929 when Tsiolkovsky was 72, Pro­fessor Herman Obert, a German scientist, wrote to him "You kindled this fire. We shall not let it die. It is necessary that man's greatest dream should be realized."

In the book "Outside the Earth" Tsiolkovsky assem­bled a group of famous scientists in an imaginary moun­tain laboratory: Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Helmbolz, Franklin and a modest Russian named Ivanov. At their disposal is an army of the world's best engineers and technicians. The year is 2017.

Together the scientists work out the theories of cosmic flight. They test rockets and fuels, discuss ways of living aboard a rocket, and design a 300-ton spaceship. The voy­age that follows is described very vividly. Some of the details of this imaginary flight you have seen in reality on your own TV screen—weightless objects floating around a cosmonaut, the black sky of space, the blast-off of a man carrying rocket.

In 1935 Tsiolkovsky wrote to Soviet youth: "All who are occupied with writing science fiction are doing good work; they excite interest, promote the working of the brain and bring into being people ⁴ who will work on grand projects in the future."

This was the last year of his life. A few days before he died, Tsiolkovsky's letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU appeared in Pravda. He wrote that all his life he had been fighting to help mankind and he was leav­ing his works to the Soviet Government and the Commu­nist Party and he was sure they would successfully com­plete this work.

UNIT 6