For me this is a hauntingly beautiful story. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was an incredibly unique scientist and visionary and airship builder. He lived in Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s and is considered one of the two fathers of rocketry (Robert Goddard the other). He was deaf since childhood. He was a mathematics teacher. And he had theories about airships and rockets and published them in books which for the most part, few read.

He spent most of his life living in an isolated rural environment – a log house. His behavior and his thinking seemed bizarre to his fellow townsfolk.

He conceived an airship which was a metallic balloon. He was inspired by Jules Verne and he imagined space travel and rocket propulsion and various kinds of aircraft and even a space elevator that would take people into space

He wrote many books (400). He also wrote an article n 1894 describing an "airplane or birdlike flying machine" which included drawings of a monoplane, and he conceived that someday a space traveler would step onto an asteroid. He believed that humans would eventually colonize the Milky Way.

Many people saw his ideas as impractical but over time, scientists around the world honored his brilliance. Werner Von Braun saw his work as incredibly visionary.

This documentary film was produced in Russia for Russians. The speaker/presenter is a professor and historian who speaks in a very poetic way about Tsiolkovsky that I enjoyed hearing. I purchased this film directly from a Russian archive when I was creating my feature documentary on the story of Sputnik, the first satellite in space which of course was built and rocketed into outer space by the Russians. By this point, Russian rocket scientists honored Tsiolkovsky and were very proud that he was a Russian.