Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
(1857–1935)

Father of Russian cosmonautics. Rocket velocity formula, multi-stage design, liquid fuel — the calculations with which a generation of engineers who built the Soviet space programme got their start: Tsander, Glushko, Korolev.

Tsiolkovsky is the central figure of the natural-scientific wing of Russian cosmism. His connection with the movement is not limited to rocket engineering: he combined engineering calculation — formulas, drawings, projects — with his own philosophy of humanity's place in the Universe. And he subordinated the first to the second: for him, the rocket was not an end but a means of carrying life beyond the bounds of the planet.

He completed his self-education at the Chertkov Library in Moscow, where its employee — Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov — selected books for him. Tsiolkovsky later acknowledged that Fyodorov had taken the place of university professors for him there.

Tsiolkovsky's best-known line is usually quoted as “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” In the original it reads differently: “The planet is the cradle of reason, but one cannot live in the cradle forever”; the familiar version took shape later. Beside it stands a second line, from a letter to the editor of the Herald of Aeronautics — “Humanity will not remain on Earth forever…”

Reaching space can easily be read as an instrument of the “Common Task”: resettlement — including of resurrected generations — requires both a place to go and a means of getting there. The logic holds together, and Tsiolkovsky is called a successor to Fyodorov for good reason. But his own motives were different: the Sun’s inexhaustible energy and space, the growth and perfection of life, the elimination of suffering.

Tsiolkovsky published his philosophical pamphlets in Kaluga at his own expense, one after another. He called his teaching monism and panpsychism: “I am not merely a materialist, but also a panpsychist who recognises the sentience of the entire Universe.”

And a caveat without which the picture would be false: he was not a resurrectionist in the Fyodorovian sense — his was an immortality of the atom-spirit, together with panpsychism, and his “cosmic ethics” contains parts that no modern humanist text would cite.