I hadn’t noticed, or noted it last week, due to my travel schedule and poor internet connectivity, but last Monday was the sesquicentennial anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He was the first, even before Goddard, to lay out the mathematical and physical foundations of spaceflight.

But unlike Goddard, he was a theoretician only, and never built any hardware. So I don’t think he ever said “Hold my vodka, and watch this…”