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..."

Another anniversary missed was the 25th anniversary of the first private commercial vehicle to reach space by Space Services incorporated from Matagorda Island.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/constoga.htm

The Vehicle reached an attitude 192 miles before crashing into the Gulf of Mexico. The launch was the stimulus for the creation of the FAA AST.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,950769,00.html

[[[Never before had a U.S. corporation built and launched its own rocket into space. "Long live free enterprise!" shouted some of the 300 giddy spectators, dozens of them investors in the project, who gathered on a Matagorda Island cow pasture to cheer the takeoff.]]]

Cost of the launch was only 2.5 million and mission control was a couple of mobile trailers.

Actually I am surprised given the PR machine of the New Space industry nothing was done to remember this launch which really marked the birth of the entrepreneurial space industry.

Tsiolkovsky did build a small wind tunnel, IIRC about 1890, to sanity-check ideas about drag and planing lift. At the time he was more interested in dirigible designs than in airfoils and HTA aircraft (as he would become later).

It wasn't the first: Wenham, Maxim and others had done tunnels in the UK starting in the 1870s. But T. was very sophisticated for the time in applying aerodynamic theory -- much of which he was creating as he went -- to designing and interpreting his experiments. Insanely sophisticated for the place: remember, we're talking a deaf schoolteacher in the boondocks with very limited access to journals and to his peers.