In the town of Kaluga south west of Moskow stand a monument to a russian schoolmaster - Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsy. Not far away is the brick and timber house in which he lived and which is now a national museum.
	At the turn of the centry Tsiolkovsky was considered an eccentric dreamer whose theories had little connection with reality. And yet if the Space Age was born anywhere, it was in the quiet romms of this humble dwelling.
	Though he never launched a rocket, Tsiolkovskys contribution to the science of space travel was immense. He began in 1883 by explaning the principles by which rockets could fly in the vacuum of space. And in "Dream of the Earth and the Sky", published in Moskow in 1885, he made the first mention of the possibilities of an artificial satelite.
	Then, in 1903, he began to publish selected chapters of his book, "Exploration of the Universe Space by Reactive Apparatus" which set out theoty of rocket flight and the prospects for space travel.
	There had, of course, been people before who had dreamed of travelling in space but, on the whole, they lacked the depth of understanding that would point the way to practical engineering achievements. Tsiolkovskys major contribution was to recommend the use of liquid the propellants which not only offered greater perfomance than the solid variety but could be more readily controlled after their ignition.
	His first sketch of a spaceship had the shape of a teardrop, with a passanger cabin in the nose and fuel tanks in the rear containing the high energy propellants liquid oxygen and hdrogen. Within the tank section he drew a long cone shaped nozzle in which the burning propellant were assumed to explain as a propulsive.
	The same propellant combination eventually would be used by future rockets, which illustrates the remarkable quality of Tsiolkovskys ideas.