Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was a Russian rocket scientist who pioneered astronautics, born in 1857 in Izhevskoye in the Russian Empire. Along with Hermann Oberth and Robert H. Goddard he is counted among the pioneers of space flight and the founding fathers of modern rocketry, and his works later inspired Wernher von Braun and Soviet rocket engineers such as Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko. He lost his hearing to scarlet fever at nine, spent most of his life in a log house near Kaluga, and derived the relation between a rocket change in speed, its exhaust velocity and its mass, now known as the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.