Nearly a century ago, in 1926, at 70 years of age, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky published the book Sixteen Stages of Space Exploration. As a philosopher and scientist focusing on humanity’s transformation into a spacefaring culture, his book is very inciteful. In this posting, I explore our progress in accomplishing these stages. In the pursuit of astroelectricity, we are at Stage 11—the point of our transition into a spacefaring culture.
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Tsiolkovsky’s early life
Tsiolkovsky was born in rural Russia, about 150 miles southeast of Moscow, in 1857, two years before the first oil well was drilled in America. He became hard of hearing at age ten as a result of scarlet fever. Because of this, he was unable to attend school, instead, he became self-taught, especially in mathematics and physics.
In the late 1860s, a century before the Apollo program, as a teenager Tsiolkovsky became interested in space travel. This was about the time that French novelist Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon was published. When his intellectual interests became apparent, his family sent him to Moscow to study, which he did at a Moscow library. It was during this time when Tsiolkovsky likely read From the Earth to the Moon. During his three years of study, he was probably exposed to Russian cosmism—a broad philosophical inquiry into the future of humankind in the cosmos. (His writings on this topic would emerge in the later years of his life.)
In 1876, at age 19, Tsiolkovsky returned home. He passed the teacher’s exam and became a teacher. While teaching, he pursued his scientific interests. He wrote his first scientific paper in 1880-81 where he developed his ideas about the kinetic theory of gases—unaware that this theory had been first proposed a quarter century earlier. After briefly focusing on animal biomechanics, his attention moved to aeronautics and astronautics. He also pursued writing what would today be considered “hard” science fiction.
In 1892 he moved to a small rural town southwest of Moscow to teach mathematics. Tsiolkovsky remained there for the rest of his life. While he married and had a family, he was considered a recluse; focusing on his scientific and writing interests.
In 1894, Tsiolkovsky conceptualized the design of a monoplane. In 1897, he also built the first wind tunnel with an open test section in Russia and, in 1900, undertook studies of the airflow around basic geometric shapes (plates, spheres, cones, etc.). This was just before similar efforts by the Wright Brothers in 1901 where they used a small wind tunnel to develop airfoil data for the design of their airplanes. His efforts, however, remained theoretical while the Wright Brothers proceeded to powered flight in 1903.
Based on his interest in rockets that began as early as 1883, on May 10, 1897, Tsiolkovsky derived the basic rocket equation—still used today—relating the change in a rocket’s velocity based on the rocket engine’s exhaust velocity, the rocket’s starting weight, and the quantity of fuel used.
In 1903 and 1911, he published and updated his paper, Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices. In this paper, Tsiolkovsky showed how to calculate the minimum speed required for Earth orbital flight and introduced the concept of “escape velocity” where he estimated the speed required to escape into the solar system.
In the 1911 update, Tsiolkovsky postulated how this could be achieved using a multistage rocket employing hydrogen and oxygen for propellants. He proposed designs for manned rockets, multi-staged rockets, airlocks, active thermal protection during reentry, and rocket engines. He was a generation ahead of later leading rocket developers such as Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Hermann Oberth, and Robert H. Goddard. His writings substantially influenced rocket engineers in Germany and the Soviet Union.
After the Russian Revolution, Tsiolkovsky turned to the study of trains riding on an air cushion along with an increased focus on the future and consequences of human spaceflight.
Sixteen Stages of Space Exploration
In 1926, Tsiolkovsky published the Sixteen Stages of Space Exploration. In developing these stages, Tsiolkovsky introduced the idea of extraterrestrial engineering to support what he believed was the inevitable expansion of humanity off the Earth.
Mankind will not forever remain on Earth but, in the pursuit of light and space, will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space.
—Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
Here is a modernized version of these stages, with accomplishments to date indicating how humanity has been moving through these stages:
1. Design of rocket-propelled, winged aircraft. Austrian Eugen Sänger is credited with designing the first rocketplane in the early 1930s. Nazi Germany built a rocket-powered fighter during World War II. The Americans used the X-1 experimental rocket-powered aircraft to break the sound barrier in level flight in 1947. This was only 20 years after the publication of the Sixteen Stages of Space Exploration.
2. Progressively increasing the speeds and altitudes reached with these rocketplanes. The X-15 envelope expansion effort reached outer space—50 miles altitude—in 1962. Thirteen X-15 flights reached outer space. The maximum speed achieved by the X-15 was Mach 6.7 (4,519 miles per hour) at an altitude of 19.3 miles in 1967. The Space Shuttle orbiter first achieved orbital velocity in 1981.
3. Designing a vertically-launched, liquid-fueled rocket. Peruvian scientist Pedro Eleodoro Paulet Mostajo, as a student in Paris, is credited with building the first liquid-fueled rocket engine in 1895. He did not publish his work and only publicly revealed it in 1927. The first vertically-launched, liquid-fueled rocket was launched by American Robert H. Goddard in 1926, the same year Sixteen Stages of Space Exploration was published. Goddard’s success was followed by efforts in Germany in the 1930s. These efforts eventually led to the German V-2 ballistic missile used during World War II.
4. Landing on the ocean while under rocket thrust. This has not yet been operationally accomplished. The Delta Clipper-Experimental (DC-X) unmanned, suborbital, reusable rocket landed under rocket thrust on land in the early 1990s. The commercial company SpaceX lands the first stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle on both the land and on barges anchored at sea. The commercial company Blue Origin is testing reusable rockets for suborbital flight that are similar to the DC-X in configuration and operation.
5. Reaching orbital flight and escape velocity. In 1946, just twenty years after Tsiolkovsky’s Sixteen Stages of Space Exploration was published, the Douglas Aircraft Company—now a part of The Boeing Company—published a report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. As a consequence, spaceships moved from science fiction to the early stages of engineering design. Eleven years later, the former Soviet Union placed the first satellite into Earth orbit in 1957, soon followed by the United States. (Historical accounts now show that the United States intentionally delayed its first orbital mission until after the Soviet Union had done so. The reason was to let the Soviet’s establish the legal precedent of orbital flight crossing the territory of foreign nations.) The Soviet Luna 1 space probe first achieved escape velocity in 1959. In 1968, the U.S. Apollo 8 mission was the first to achieve escape velocity with a crewed vehicle.
(The RAND study—the first by Project RAND—was commissioned by Army Air Forces Major General Curtis E. LeMay, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development. He “considered space operations to be an extension of air operations.” At that time, the Army and Navy were competing head-to-head politically for being assigned the lead responsibility for space. The Navy undertook a similar study of the topic at the time this RAND study was undertaken.)
6. Extending spaceflight mission durations. Human missions in space have increased in mission duration since the early 1960s. Several humans have now accumulated more than one year off-Earth.
7. Growing plants in spacecraft. The first plants were grown in space on the Soviet Salyut 7 space station in 1982. Numerous experiments since have tried to understand the role of gravity in plant growth and reproduction.
8. Undertaking extravehicular activity (EVA) in a space suit. Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov was the first to do this in 1965 when he emerged from his space capsule for a brief spacewalk. NASA astronauts undertook EVAs in the 1960s in preparation for the lunar landings. The Apollo astronauts on the Moon, beginning in 1969, were the first to conduct operationally independent EVA in space suits. With the Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station (ISS), EVA has become a standard operational capability.
9. Building greenhouses in orbital space stations for growing plants. A small artificially-lit growing chamber is being used in the ISS to experiment with plant growth. Edible plants, such as lettuce, have been successfully grown.
10. Building large space stations orbiting the Earth. The ISS is the largest space structure orbiting the Earth. However, it is designed for only a modest crew size to conduct research, not as an operational space station. Large, operational space stations were first seriously proposed in the 1950s to support future American missions beyond Earth orbit. As the American human space enterprise shifts from exploration to commercialization, operational space stations will be built in low Earth orbit to disembark passengers from the Earth and embark passengers traveling elsewhere in the solar system.
11. Using sunlight to power human habitats, propel spacecraft, grow food, and meet humanity’s growing need for sustainable energy. Using photovoltaic solar arrays, sunlight has been used to power space systems since the 1960s and space stations since the 1970s. As I discuss in Astroelectricity, GEO space solar power is becoming recognized as humanity’s primary future energy source until a breakthrough in practical fusion energy is achieved.
12. Building human colonies and space systems using lunar and asteroid resources. Human space efforts are now at the threshold of seriously considering the building of human colonies beyond low Earth orbit. These colonies will be used to house the people building space-based sustainable energy systems. Such colonies will necessarily require the use of extraterrestrial resources for their construction.
In the late 1970s, physicist Gerard K. O’Neill popularized building large space colonies using extraterrestrial resources. Forty years ago, in 1976, NASA published a significant study of such colonies. One design from this study is shown in the illustration below. Companies are now forming to undertake the robotic exploration of asteroids in preparation for mining these resources for future commercial space operations.
13. Civilization expands throughout the Solar System. This is the stage that reflects Tsiolkovsky’s thinking when he wrote: “Man must at all costs overcome the Earth’s gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System.” Humanity’s expansion into the Solar System is now just a matter of developing the new technology needed and providing the necessary energy. Serious planning is already underway on how to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars indicating the willingness of some to leave the Earth to settle the Solar System.
14. Human civilization achieves utopia. Achieving a technology-enabled utopia has been discussed for nearly two centuries, probably longer. The key is having plentiful, affordable energy supplies—both in the form of food and industrial energy—to permit a prosperous technological society to function without distress. This is now possible to achieve through the utilization of the natural resources of outer space.
15. Civilization expands beyond the Solar System. NASA’s space probe Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has achieved escape velocity from the Solar System. It is now the farthest from the Sun of several space probes that have left the Solar System. Plans are underway to send space probes to nearby solar systems using laser-propelled light sails attached to advanced space probes the size of a computer chip. The lasers would likely be stationed in orbit about the Sun in the inner solar system and would be solar-powered. The laser-propelled sails would enable these probes to reach their destination solar systems in only a few decades. Obtaining information on where human life could exist in other solar systems is the first step in the eventual expansion of humanity beyond the Solar System.
Closing thoughts
In less than a century of scientifically understanding what human spaceflight will involve, we have now progressed to Stage 11—ready to tap the natural resources of outer space to meet humanity’s need for sustainable energy. Starting this stage will automatically move us into Stages 12 and 13—as we will need to permanently live in outer space by becoming spacefarers. What an exciting future for the coming generations!
I have only lightly touched Tsiolkovsky’s influence on our culture’s thinking about becoming a spacefaring civilization. More information on his philosophical writings is here and his many other technology innovations and diverse investigations here.
If not already following this blog, please click the “follow” button at the bottom right to sign up. Receiving notification via email is best to ensure that you do not miss a new posting. Sending notifications is the only use of your email address. It is not sold or used elsewhere. Besides, you can always unsubscribe. Please forward these postings to your friends who share your spacefaring interest. Also, please check out the Spacefaring Institute’s YouTube channel.
James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chair of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC (spacefaringinstitute.net) which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the U.S. Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he began to study the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and energy. His technical papers are located at https://www.mikesnead.com and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Snead/research. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or through email sent to spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.