Part 1: Chapter 1, The Human Seed and Social Soil: Rocketry and Revolution Summary and Analysis

Part I begins with the death of Tsar Alexander II, blown up by a bomb from the chemistry lab of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute that his own father had founded. At this time, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was already writing about rocketry and gravity and trying to design rocket ships. He is known as the father of modern cosmonautics. Even backward Russia was active in work on aviation and rocketry in the years before World War I and the Russian Revolution.

The book opens with the name of the pioneers of rocketry: Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, Korolev, and von Braun. Tsiolkovsky is the Russian boy genius that designed a space ship powered by centrifugal force at the age of sixteen and also discovered...