K E Tsiolkovskii was a science popularizer, novelist, technical inventor, and visionary, whose science fiction writings included futuristic drawings of space stations long before they appeared on any engineer's drawing board. This title shows that Tsiolkovskii was more than either a rocket inventor or a propaganda tool.

Often called the grandfather of Russian rocketry, K. E. Tsiolkovskii first conceived of multi-stage rockets that would later be adapted as the basis of both the U.S. and Soviet rocket programs. Mining a myriad of Russian archives, Andrews produces a study of Soviet technological propaganda, local science education, public culture in the 1920s and 1930s, and the cultural ramifications of space flight.