Road to the Stars (Дорога к звездам)

ROAD TO THE STARS

Man has walked the hard path of knowledge on his planet.

He has always wanted to get where he has not been,

and to know what was not yet known.

Man has set off on a distant voyage despite the grave dangers.

He has conquered the poles,

gone high above the clouds,

descended into the deep.

Overcoming innumerable difficulties.

He has found the way to the innermost recesses of nature,

penetrated into living cells

and the structure of atoms.

He seeks to unravel the mysteries of the Universe,

to become conscious of himself.

But never before has the man broken away from his planet.

And now the time has come

when he took the first step over the threshold of his home.

It is obvious. The man has grown.

The world's first artificial satellite has been created.

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever." Tsiolkovsky

We start with a story about this great and humble scientist.

The end of the 19th century,

remote Russian province, pious merchant city of Kaluga.

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky works as a teacher in a primary school.

Serious childhood illness has made him almost deaf for life.

Communicating with people became difficult.

He had to undergo a self-taught course in High School and then in the University.

But more than deafness,

the difference in interests alienated Tsiolkovsky from his milieu.

People did not understand him and considered eccentric.

The province, separated from centres of science,

lacked books and magazines, as well as educated people.

He had to learn everything by himself.

And he had a great thirst for action.

He wanted to improve people's lives.

New concepts, startling in their boldness, arose in the mind of the humble teacher:

to break away from the Earth,

to fly into the outer space,

to use the energy of the Sun.

Tsiolkovsky found listeners only among children

who were avid for everything unusual, interesting and new.

Tell me, children, can one go to the moon in a balloon?

In a balloon? Of course not.

Why?

Because the balloon moves only in the air,

and the air can be found only here - around the Earth.

Further, there is no air - only a void.

But this is only one reason.

There is one more. - What is it?

Look.

I throw a stone up in the air and it comes back down.

Why is that?

I don't know.

Please, be seated.

Earth draws to itself stones and water,

and keeps us close as captives.

On the ground, one can move as one likes,

but one cannot make a step off the Earth.

If one pushes oneself off the Earth, it returns one back from the void.

Do not fly to the moon.

And no way to escape?

The gravity can be overcome...

The gravity can be overcome with speed.

One has to fly away from the Earth faster than it can draw one back.

This velocity was calculated by Newton.

The Earth draws a stone to itself by five meters per second.

The Earth is spherical.

Within the distance of 8 kilometres,

the surface of the Earth deviates from the plane by 5 meters.

If a stone crosses these eight kilometres in one second,

it will descend by the same amount as the Earth's surface deviated from the plane.

A stone, thrown with such speed,

will fly neither approaching the ground nor moving away from it.

It it will spin around the Earth.

This is so-called "circular velocity".

A stone thrown with even greater speed

will move around in an ellipse.

Finally, for the escape velocity of 11km per second

a stone will leave the Earth forever.

What tremendous speed.

Ten times greater than the velocity of an artillery shell.

Jules Verne knew these numbers.

He placed the characters of his novel in a shell

and shot them from a huge cannon cast directly in the ground.

Wonderful fantasy...

But no cannon using gunpowder can give orbital velocity to a projectile.

Besides, people inside the projectile, would be killed by a sudden jolt.

A projectile won't do.

We need a ship that could gain speed gradually

and go wherever we want there, in the void.

But there is nothing to push off from in the void.

There is no land, no water and no air.

I'll show you from what one can push off from in the void.

That support for pushing off from has to be taken up there also.

I don't understand.

You can to push off from any object,

from any substance that has weight or mass.

We are motionless now.

Now look.

I push off from one oar.

From the other oar...

What are you doing?

From the anchor...

...from the bench...

...from the bucket...

...from the umbrella... - Konstantin Eduardovich!

Well? Are we moving or not?

We are moving! Indeed we are!

Which was to be demonstrated.

In the void, one can only move in this way;

throwing back a portion of your mass.

This is recoil, reaction,

Newton's Third Law:

"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."

A cannon...

Might one fly to the moon riding a cannon?

If we imagine a cannon hanging in the void,

after firing it will move in the opposite direction.

If firing again, it will fly faster.

Shooting over and over again the cannon can be accelerated to reach high speed.

The solution is somewhere very close.

ROCKET

A rocket!

A rocket, known for hundreds of years.

Instead of shells, it throws back a gas stream.

Gases push off from a rocket, and vice versa

and they fly in opposite directions.

Gases backwards, and a rocket - forward.

A rocket needs no air for support - the latter only hinders the flight.

But can a rocket develop cosmic velocity?

I must do the calculations and formulate the law of its motion.

The formula of a rocket's movement.

A rocket can increase its speed infinitely,

everything depends on the supply of fuel.

What yesterday was still a fantasy...

now has a solid foundation of mathematical calculations.

A rocket.

This is a genuine ship of the universe.

It will be a huge rocket.

Gunpowder is not suitable.

We must take a more efficient fuel, such as gasoline with liquid oxygen.

Liquid fuel is generally more convenient.

It can be fed into the combustion chamber via pumps.

In front of the rocket, there will be a cabin for passengers.

In order to cool the sheathing,

it needs double walls, which liquid oxygen will pass through prior to combustion.

The stream of gases requires rudders made of a refractory material.

Then the ship will be controllable.

And it has to be controlled automatically.

Tsiolkovsky worked on his paper for several years.

This was the beginning of a new science - Astronautics.

His paper was published in 1903

and was entitled "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices".

How tremendous are the opportunities opened up to the mankind by

departure into space.

Colonization of space.

Life without gravity,

Visits to other planets...

But these dreams

were so hopelessly distant from real life...

"Rootless fantasise",

"crazy dreamer",

"who needs your reaction devices?"

"What do you want? To be heard in St. Petersburg?"

But the official science of Tsarist Russia

turned her back to the Russian genius.

It bowed subserviently before Europe.

Tsiolkovsky wrote then:

"The main driving force of my life

is to do something useful for people.

Not to live my life in vain, but to advance the humanity forward at least a little bit.

That's why I has taken interest in what doesn't give me neither bread nor power.

But I hope that maybe soon, maybe in the distant future, my work

will give the society mountains of bread and plenty of power..."

Tsiolkovsky persisted in his hard work.

After all, the flight into space is possible so far only in theory.

A number of assumptions have been made:

the best fuel, extremely durable and lightweight materials,

very high combustion temperatures.

Technology is still very far from that...

The main difficulty lies in the fact

that a space rocket needs a lot of fuel.

A rocket having less fuel has already spent it.

The second one continues to gain speed.

But it has run out of fuel too.

And the cosmic velocity is not yet reached.

What to do?

In his declining years, Tsiolkovsky solves this problem also.

He puts together multiple rockets to form a train.

He makes a composite rocket.

In the beginning, it's the first rocket's turn.

When the fuel runs out,

the rocket gets detached, saving the train from excess weight, and returns to Earth.

The second one continues to gain speed.

The last one still has full tanks

and the speed is already above four kilometres per second. A bit more...

And the cosmic velocity will be reached.

"The mankind will not remain on the Earth forever,

but in the pursuit of light and space,

it will, at first, timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere,