James Webb (centre) served as NASA's second chief from February 1961 to October 1968; rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun (right) served as the first director of the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama from 1960 to 1970 (Image: NASA-MSFC)
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
1857-1935
THINK of all the paraphernalia of the space age: rockets, space suits, space stations and so on. Someone had to think of them first. That person was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Born in the Russian town of Izhevskoye, Tsiolkovsky made a massive contribution to the space age. He recognised that rockets were a prerequisite of space travel, and wrote down the “rocket…
