Explorer and space travel pioneer Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkowsky was born in 1857 in Izhevskoye in Russia and died in 1935 in Kaluga. Tsiolkowsky was the first to begin scientific study of the technologies with which mankind has penetrated into near and deep space. His most important scientific work on space travel is The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices from 1903. The book deals with the conquest of space with the help of rocket technologies. The scope of his theoretical and practical work is huge. Tsiolkowsky was also the first to see the possibilities of a geostationary station, placed in the Earth’s orbit.

His ideas were later developed, realised and confirmed in 1926 by American rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945).

Alongside Tsiolkowsky, Noordung and Goddard, Hermann Oberth (1894–1989) is considered one of the fathers of modern space technology. Oberth was a physicist and his main scientific work was the 1923 book Ways to Spaceflight ( Wege zur Raumschiffahrt).

Herman Potočnik Noordung published The Problem of Space Travel in 1928!