Manned Spaceflight Begins
Astronautics is the science and technology of spaceflight. It is derived from the Greek words astro, meaning "star," and nautes, meaning "sailor." A person who travels into space is known as an astronaut in the United States and in those countries that form the European Space Agency or ESA. (The ESA, created in 1962 as the European Space Research Organization, is a multinational organization dedicated to the exploration of space. Headquartered in Paris, France, it is composed of fifteen member states: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.) An astronaut employed by the Russian Aviation and Space Agency is known as a cosmonaut, the Anglicized form of the Russian kosmonavt. Chinese astronauts are known in the West as taikonauts, after tai kong, the Chinese word for "space." In China, all astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts are referred to as yuhangyuan, meaning "space traveler."
The idea of human "space travelers" had been envisioned long before all these words had been coined. At the end of the nineteenth century, Russian scientist and rocket
expert Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), often referred to as the "father of astronautics," had theorized the construction of a rocket that utilized liquid fuel and was capable of carrying humans into space.
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