posted 03-29-2014 02:29 PM               

If you don't know about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, here's a quick overview:

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), a self-taught Russian school teacher, is recognized as the first man to truly envision human space travel and habitation. Though well-known in the states of the former Soviet Union, his work is scarcely known in the West. Inspired by the practitioners of the remarkable late nineteenth century Russian philosophical school known as Cosmism, Tsiolkovsky’s work, in the end, was a profound influence on the international development of space science.

During his lifetime he published over 500 works on space travel and related subjects, and was most prolific in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. In his works can be found designs for space stations, rockets with steering thrusters, airlocks for exiting a spaceship into the vacuum of space, and closed cycles for biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.