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To design and build a spacecraft, you need to be able to figure out how big to make it, how heavy it can be, how fast it will have to go, how much fuel it needs and so forth. For that, you need a theory of how objects move in space and how to make the calculations. Three brilliant men worked out almost all theory of space flight over a period of nearly three centuries - from 1600 to 1900
Johannes Kepler:
Was the German mathematician who, in 1609, figured out the equations for orbiting planets & satellites? In particular, he determined that the planets move in ellipses (flattened circles) rather than true circles.
Isaac Newton:
In 1687 he wrote what is probably the single greatest intellectual achievement of all time. In a single book he established the basic laws of force, motion, and gravitation and invented a new branch of mathematics in the process (calculus). He did all this to show how the force of gravity is the reason that planet's orbits follow Kepler's equations.
Konstantin Ziolkovsky:
A Russian school teacher who, without ever launching a single rocket himself, was the first to figure out all the basic equations for rocketry - in 1903. From his very broad and extensive reading including Jules Verne's "From the Moon" he concluded that space travel was a possibility, that it was in fact man's destiny, and that rockets would be the way to pull it off. He anticipated and solved many of the problems that were going to come up for rocket-powered flight and drew up several rocket designs. He determined that liquid fuel rockets would be needed to get to space, and that the rockets would need to be built in stages (he called them \"rocket trains\"). He concluded that oxygen and hydrogen would be the most powerful fuels to use. He had predicted how, 65 years later, the Saturn V rocket would operate for the first landing of men on the moon
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