Today, space-based applications such as navigation systems, weather and climate observations or satellite communication have long been part of the personal everyday life of the vast majority of people. The research conducted on board the international space station directly benefits humankind.
We have also long got used to sensational images from the surface of other celestial bodies: Be it the transmissions of the Apollo astronauts from the moon between 1969 and 1972 or the spectacular shots of the Mars rovers of our time. And the incredible images that space telescopes have been sending back to Earth for several decades inspire not only astronomers.
All this is astronautics!
But when, where and how did astronautics actually start?
For many, the space age begins with the launch of the first satellite Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union on the 4th. October 1957 and the space race during the Cold War.
This is not wrong, but the history of space travel has its origins much earlier.
Because without well-founded theoretical foundations, first engineering concepts and concrete ideas about the meaning and purpose of missions into space, but also without fascination on the one hand and doubts, wrong paths, contradictions and intensive debates on the other, this first step would not have been possible in 1957.
Dominated until the 19th century. Century especially mythical ideas and fictions of travel into space the scenery, mark the first decades of the 20th century. Century the beginning of a serious scientific-technical, theoretical study of the question of "space travel" and the technical means required for it.
We understand this crucial phase of the transition from pure space fiction to the actual realization of the first space flights, lasting more than four decades, as an "early" space history.
These beginnings were significantly shaped, even though in very different ways, by four men who nowadays are considered the "fathers" of rocketry and astronautics:
Konstantin Ziolkowski, Robert Esnault Pelterie, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth.
