The Dawn

The desire to fly like birds and touch the Moon is as old as mankind and is documented in some classic works of pure fantasy. In the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution, writers began to draw on science and technology to make their fantastical inventions plausible. A new and successful literary genre, science fiction, was born. Finally, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, real space science took its first steps, thanks to the work of a unique, self-taught man lost in the endless countryside of the Tsarist Empire, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. We owe to this deaf and reclusive scientist, a disciple of a philosopher in love with progress, the first studies on the applications of an “engine” powered by black powder, discovered by the Chinese and used by them for recreational purposes or to make rudimentary projectiles. From the idea of the rocket, which until then had been exploited only for military purposes in the West, Tsiolkovsky also developed the first projections of a true colonization of space. A starting point for young dreamers all over the world in a century plagued by devastating material and moral conflicts and enlightened by new ideals.