Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry

Chapter 5. Stalin, Khrushchev, and the Spaceman: Technology, Soviet National Identity, and the Memorialization of a Local Hero in the Dawn of Sputnik, 1928–1957

5 STALIN, KHRUSHCHEV, AND THE SPACEMAN TECHNOLOGY, SOVIET NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE MEMORIALIZATION OF A LOCAL HERO IN THE DAWN OF SPUTNIK, 1928–1957 In the final years of his life, K. E. Tsiolkovskii continued to theorize and write about the possibility of spaceflight and inhabiting other worlds in the cosmos. He was in voluminous correspondence with a variety of technical and engineering institutes involved in rocket research. Throughout the last seven years of his life, prominent technicians and scientists visited him in Kaluga. These scientists also wrote to him about his inspirational novels and writings, saying he was a catalyst for their own scientific work. Tsiolkovskii, in the final year of his life, would be canonized by the Stalinist regime with a celebrated May Day speech from Red Square in 1935. Furthermore, his legacy would live on during countless celebrations , particularly during the 1957 centennial celebration of his birth that coincided fortuitously with the launching of Sputnik I. By the time the Khrushchev era came to a close, he would become a household name in Soviet Russia; furthermore, his impact on rocketry globally would be heralded as visionary by the Soviets and westerners, and then modified and critiqued from within Russia after 1991 for its limitations. STALIN’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION, TECHNOLOGICAL VISIONS, AND THE END OF TSIOLKOVSKII’S CAREER, 1928–1935 In the last seven years of his life, Tsiolkovskii traveled little, barely leaving Kaluga, with the exception of a few ceremonial visits to Moscow between 1932 and 1935, the year of his death. He corresponded avidly with young scientists, however, and wrote 80 chapter 5 voluminous passages on rocketry and interplanetary travel. Throughout the 1920s, Tsiolkovskii struggled to design a rocket on paper that would not be weighed down excessively by liquid propellant . His solution was to develop a two-stage rocket, which he elaborated upon in his 1929 piece “Space Rocket Trains.”1 The first stage would be the “ground rocket,” which would move along the ground and in the dense layers of the atmosphere at high speeds.2 However, it should be noted that his idea of multistage rockets was not new. Goddard had thought of this in 1914 as well as Oberth in 1923. Even Russians had conceived of this notion, such as Iuri Kondratyuk in 1917.Yet Tsiolkovskii in “Space Rocket Trains” did not confine himself to enunciating the operating principles of multistage rockets. He actually was more interested in detailed mathematical formulas to generate cosmic velocities by means of rocket engines with chemical propellants—in reality, one of the main technical contributions he would be remembered for by later engineers, such as Sergei Korolev. Furthermore, Tsiolkovskii believed that the maximum velocity attained by multistage rockets was given by the sum of the additional velocities of all the stages.3 In “Aims of Astronautics” (1929), he continued to discuss the colonization of outer space by humans. He believed the chief purpose of space exploration, and therefore rocket flights, was the ultimate establishment of colonies or extended settlements in the cosmos. He believed this would first take place around the Earth and then in the vast reaches of the universe. He envisaged a cosmos literally filled with industrial and residential bases in which humans organized their life in a radically new environment.4 Furthermore , he had an optimistic view of the future of the human race, in that by colonizing the cosmos it would achieve a type of immortality. Though this immortality differed from N. Fedorov’s notion of resurrection, it had an element of the ceaselessness of mankind as it conquered the outer limits of the universe. There may have been a subtle eugenic notion to Tsiolkovskii’s faith in the perfection of the human race as it “conquered” nature. This transformationalism, however, may have fit into the Stalinist industrialization project and transplanted Stalin’s ecological paradigm of the “transformation of nature” with a concept of stalin, khrushchev, and the spaceman 81 “transformation of the cosmos.”Yet one must be careful comparing his unbounded vision of space colonization and immortality to the totalitarian notions of racial or social perfection and domination (of nature and other humans) so common to the 1930s in Germany or Soviet Russia. Though Tsiolkovskii continued to write in Kaluga, as his health deteriorated he seemed to write pieces that were summaries of earlier concepts. In 1932 he wrote “Reaching the Stratosphere,” in which he summarized his many years...