“Works on rocket technology by K. E. Tsiolkovskiy”

NASA technical translation

1947

 

THE WORKS OF K. E. TSIOLKOVSKIY ON ROCKET TECHNOLOGY

K. E. Tsiolkovskiy devoted a rather substantial portion of his works to the problem of flight by means of various reactive devices.

We may state without exaggeration that Tsiolkovskiy considered his efforts in this direction to be of prime importance. Up to the time of his death Tsiolkovskiy continuously published articles, notes, and calculations devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the possibilities and methods of interplanetary communications.

The grandeur of the problem and the consequences of its solution were not known to anyone else as clearly as they were known to Tsiolkovskiy. None of the authors concerned with the problems of interplanetary flights went as far as Tsiolkovskiy in discussing the future social and economic implications of the solution of this problem.

The problem of rocket flight is extremely broad. Tsiolkovskiy developed it in considerable detail, beginning with the stratospheric semirocket airplane with a flight altitude of approximately 30 km and ending with an interplanetary rocket ship for travel into interstellar space. Among the works of Tsiolkovskiy the reader will find propositions on the use of reactive exhaust from aircraft engines, projects for powerful semirocket engines for an airplane, a project of air-breathing rocket engines for flights into the stratosphere_ outlines of a rocket airplane for flying out of the atmosphere, considerations on the structure of interplanetary stations, and finally, a proposition on future colossal settlements somewhere in the region of the asteroids. He considered all of these subjects in a scientific manner; they were not the products of his fantaay. Loglcal conclusions were expressed by Tsiolkovskiy, based on results obtained by mathematical calculations and by the utilization of the state of the art in all fields of science and technology.

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You have read the article by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

You can download it for free in PDF format from the “The Collection of Works” section of the website. Unfortunately, most of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s works have not been translated into English. You can familiarize yourself with the works in Russian from the “Научное наследие” (“Scientific heritage”) section of the website.

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