After he calculated how to launch a ship into space, Russian math teacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky continued to hatch designs and plot the exploration of the solar system. But hardly a soul knew of his work. From time to time during the 1900s and 1910s, a magazine published one of his pieces, but for the most part his manuscripts --amazing works of imagination that described the Earth from space, the effects of weightlessness, closed environmental systems, and even a train-like multi-stage rocket piled up in his small laboratory.
On more than one occasion, Tsiolkovsky sent papers explaining his ideas and asking for support to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dmitri Mendeleyev himself, the inventor of the periodic table of elements, singled out his work as superior, but even so the Academy awarded Tsiolkovsky only 400 rubles. Only after the Russian Revolution in 1917 did Tsiolkovsky, already in his early sixties, gain recognition.
Under the new Soviet regime, Tsiolkovsky's pioneering work was embraced and celebrated.
Lenin's Soviet government raised Tsiolkovsky to the status of a patron saint and awarded him a lifelong pension. Though it would be some time before the rest of the world would learn of his insights, Tsiolkovsky finally saw his complete writings published and was accepted into the highest scientific circles. He passed the fifteen remaining years of his life honored as the "Father of Cosmonautics."
