World-renowned physicist and futurist Michio Kaku explores in rich, accessible detail how humanity might gradually develop a sustainable civilization in outer space. More than a possibility, it is becoming a necessity: whether our hand is forced by climate change and resource depletion or whether future catastrophes compel us to abandon Earth, one day we will make our homes among the stars. Humans first landed on the moon in the 1960s, but now there is renewed interest in returning.Human civilization is on the verge of spreading beyond Earth. Nevertheless, von Braun would be integral to the space race that followed. Von Braun was later arrested by the Gestapo after witnessing the slave labor camps that helped build his rockets and he expressed regret about contributing to the Nazi war machine. While it set new records in rocketry, it would also prove devastating when used as a missile against the cities of London and Antwerp during 1944. With a wealth of funding and the best scientists at his disposal, von Braun’s V-2 rocket was three times faster than the speed of sound and invulnerable to defenses. Being strictly a rocket nerd, he wasn’t interested in politics when he accepted generous amounts of government funding and was made the head of the V-2 project, or Vengeance Weapon 2. He found work as a rocket scientist with the nation’s massive push to develop cutting-edge weapons.

Wernher Von Braun was a graduate student of physics when Germany began its militarization under the Nazi regime. It was Goddard who first made the switch from powdered to liquid fuel, as well as introducing efficient multi-staged rockets made up of multiple fuel tanks jettisoned as dead weight after use. Tsiolkovsky’s work laid the foundation for other trailblazers like the American scientist Robert Goddard. With this equation, Tsiolkovsky revealed that it was indeed possible for a rocket to escape the Earth’s atmosphere, and scientists could now calculate how much fuel was needed to travel to the moon or Mars.

In 1903, he published work that included the Tsiolkovsky equation, which provided a solid mathematical relationship between a rocket’s fuel and the rate of speed it could achieve. The first major scientific breakthrough in space travel came from the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Sending rockets into space has been a human endeavor for quite some time, going back further than the 1950s, which saw the so-called space race between the US and Russia.

There’s a lot of attention on space travel these days, with privately owned ventures like SpaceX making headlines in their mission to take customers into the great beyond.

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