by Julia Seibert
A tiny blink of light, barely visible among the incandescent strands of sunlight dancing through the inky chasm of space… our home planet never looked so meaningless. Pale Blue Dot, an image taken by the Voyager space probe as it left our solar system, is perhaps the most unsettling selfie ever snapped: Earth, its history, and all its inhabitants (dead or alive) shown just as we are, a speck of dust in an endless universe. A downright depressing concept – so unimaginable, in fact, that throughout much of our history aboard this little rock, the comforting worldview that the universe revolved around us was a popular one.
However, it was not to be. Over time, scientists armed with math, telescopes, and a streak of rebellion promptly shattered any hope of cosmic dominance, studied what was out there, and even figured out how to get us off our rock (though some corners of YouTube will tell you it is all a grand conspiracy). Even today, space scientists continue to dazzle, inspire, and scare the living daylights out of us. There are too many important figures to count, but below are the most famous space scientists.
Famous Space Scientists
1. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
A degreeless son of a court musician, Galileo Galilei was a rebel if there ever was one. The Italian’s contributions are wide-ranging and impressive – pioneering several aspects of astronomy – and earned him the title of ‘father of modern science’ (given to him by Einstein, no less). His work included fiddling with and improving the telescope (discovering a handful of astronomical features, such as a couple of Jupiter’s moons, while he was at it), running experiments to show how gravity causes the same acceleration regardless of mass, and defending the heliocentric model of the solar system. Much of the latter philosophy stemmed from his predecessors and colleagues such as Nicolaus Copernicus (who first formulated heliocentricity) and Johannes Kepler (who refined the Copernican model and postulated three laws of planetary motion).
(Not-so) fun fact: his advocacy for heliocentricity thoroughly pissed off the Catholic church, who declared him guilty of heresy and sentenced him to house arrest, where he remained for the final nine years of his life. Rumor has it that during his trial, Galileo could not resist muttering ‘eppur si muove’ – ‘and yet it moves’ – referring to the Earth moving around the sun. Fictitious or not, the daring statement sums up his martyrdom to science, wherein he absorbed the fury of the mainstream to pave the way for all astronomy to follow.
2. Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
With the 17th-century scientific revolution in its heyday, a young Isaac Newton felt like a kid in a candy store. The ingenious space scientist neglected his classes at Cambridge University’s Trinity College to spend time studying the newer, more advanced stuff. School was soon shut down for two years due to an outbreak of the bubonic plague though, and the Englishman returned home to his family farm. Instead of lounging around in his pajamas baking bread, however, Newton revolutionized astronomy and mathematics.
Though the results of his musings were only published much later, it was during his working-from-home years that the space scientist began to make inroads on planetary motions, optics, and calculus (the famous apple story is attributed to this time). His 1687 masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica – or Principia for short – describes calculus, gravity as a force (more on that later), and three laws of motion, which, for the most part, are still remarkably accurate today. His work on optics led to his inventing a reflecting telescope, which in turn inspired large telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope.
(Not-so) fun fact: likely shaped by a rough childhood, Newton was spiteful. He was secretive with a bit of a temper, and, as a child, threatened to burn down his house with his parents inside it. The murderous impulse may have lessened with age, but Newton remained ‘cold and calculating, cunning and quick-tempered’ and liked to hold a grudge, leaving him friendless and unmarried (as reported by Forbes). Still, he gave much credit to those that came before him, writing that ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.
3. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)
Early life was hard on who we now know as the father of cosmonautics and human spaceflight. Russian-born Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who lost his hearing at 10 and his mother at 13, received no formal education on account of his deafness, but was tutored by Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovitch Fedorov. The latter was fascinated with spaceflight, and it seems Tsiolkovsky caught the bug, too. His best-known achievement was deriving the rocket equation, which accurately yet simply describes the relationship between gravity and the mass and velocity of a rocket.
That is just the beginning; it is impossible to neatly sum up all of Tsiolkovsky’s contributions, which arose decades before the space race. His over 500 works revolve around a human future in space, including designs for multi-stage rockets and space stations, a sixteen-step plan for space colonization, as well as examinations of the philosophy of space travel. This space scientist even spookily predicted the Fermi paradox concerning life elsewhere long before its formal conception.
Fun fact: in addition to his copious scientific work, Tsiolkovsky was an avid sci-fi writer. Despite the genre’s far-fetched nature, however, most concepts in Tsiolkovsky’s stories remain rooted in reality, featuring, for example, lighter gravity on the moon. There is a reason for that: ‘[the works] weren’t aesthetically beautiful or meant as high literature… they were meant as pedological tools to understand space travel’ explains Asif Siddiqi, space exploration scholar and professor of history at Fordham University (as reported by Popular Mechanics). Tsiolkovsky’s ideas did not remain solely in the realm of fiction though as they went on to inspire the Sputnik generation, setting into motion the Soviet space program. His philosophy is best summed up by his most famous quote:
“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”
4. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It is hard to overstate the significance of Albert Einstein’s contributions to science, as his work brought about two highly accurate, yet inherently incompatible worlds of physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. For the most part, classical physics, including Newtonian principles, serve us just fine when describing the world around us. However, when dealing with the really fast, really big, or really small, things get weird. Einstein quickly realized this, and put forward his theory of special relativity in 1905. Among many other things, it introduced the famous mass-energy equivalence and time dilation thanks to the constant speed of light in a vacuum. Its sibling, general relativity, came about ten years later and added gravity into the mix. Einstein argued that gravity was not a force like Newton said, but rather a pseudo-force arising from the warping of spacetime, the fabric in which all objects in the universe are suspended.
Einstein’s relationship with quantum physics (for the really small) was more complicated. Though he helped bring the concept about by describing the photoelectric effect (arguing that energy is emitted in set packages, or quanta) and winning a Nobel prize for it, he was not convinced it was an accurate model for the whole universe. Einstein favored the smooth determinism of relativity, whereas quantum mechanics relies on probabilities and a certain degree of randomness. His famous quote ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ describes his displeasure at this unpredictability.
Fun fact: many of Einstein’s physics have proven themselves over and over, such as the warping of light around heavy objects and, despite his protests, quantum mechanics. However, the iconic space scientist was not always correct. Einstein’s own general relativity implied that the universe must be expanding, but he himself rejected the idea and introduced a so-called cosmological constant, or lambda, to the equations to make for a static universe.
After Belgian priest Georges Lemaître published a paper describing an expanding universe based on relativity in 1927, Einstein called his physics ‘abominable’ during a walk through Brussels’ Leopold Park. Two years later, however, American astronomer Edwin Hubble measured the light from 24 galaxies and determined that the further their distance, the faster they were speeding away from us: solid, observable evidence that the universe was expanding. Einstein finally accepted the idea in 1931.
5. Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)
Wernher von Braun, the ‘father of rocket science’ and mastermind behind NASA’s Saturn V rocket, was quite the dubious figure. The German spent a good chunk of his career developing the V-2 ballistic missile for his country’s Nazi party, of which he was a member. The missile led to thousands of deaths, of both its targets and those working on it. It was also the first-ever large liquid-propelled rocket and became the first artificial object to reach (albeit suborbital) space. The US simply had to have it.
When the war ended, US spooks implemented Operation Paperclip, a top secret program that involved recruiting about 1,500 German and Austrian scientists – including von Braun – covering up their records, and moving them to the States to work on rockets. The Soviets claimed some Germans too, and made headway on their own rocketry plans, headed by Sergei Korolev (who deserves an honorable mention here). Still, despite early Soviet success, it was von Braun’s rocket for NASA – the gargantuan Saturn V – that clinched the space race victory and molded the space industry for years, if not decades, to come. No humans have reached the moon since the rocket’s retirement.
(Not-so) fun fact: in 1944, von Braun once drunkenly expressed disappointment regarding his work and was detained for it. After having a few too many at a party, the renowned scientist slurred that Germany’s efforts in the war were going badly, and that he just wanted to build spaceships. He was swiftly arrested, but released after two weeks due to his importance to the program. However, evidence of this anecdote is relatively thin as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was looking for a way to grasp control of rocket production and had his eye on von Braun anyway.
6. Frank Drake (1930-2022)
American astrophysicist, Frank Drake, started out as a radio astronomer, studying pulsars and the solar system. Soon, however, his attention drifted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a subject that had played on his mind since he was eight. Beguiled by the Fermi paradox – the conundrum that logically, we should see evidence of aliens, but have not discovered any – he set about trying to make sense of the apparent rarity of life.
Countless possible explanations to the paradox exist, ranging from life being confined to Earth to some ‘great filter’ wiping them out, and Drake put forward an equation to offer more insight. The Drake equation () combines several variables, including the rate of star formation and the fraction of planets with advanced civilizations, to spit out the number of civilizations in our galaxy. Though most variables are not known, leading to a wide range of outcomes, the equation gives some structure and guidance in what is already a highly speculative field.
)Fun fact: Drake and Carl Sagan were lifelong collaborators and worked together on the plaques aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, which depicted diagrams of humans and where the probes hailed from. The two also worked on the Voyager golden record several years later, which included images as well as sounds. Only an advanced alien civilization would be able to decode the records, though we may have to wait at least a few thousand years for that to happen. Sending messages might go both ways though, and Drake worried about us not having the technology to pick up the phone.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it,” he said.
7. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
English theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking’s presence on Earth seemed written in the stars: he was born exactly 300 years after Galileo’s death, and died on Einstein’s birthday. Yet, his life was almost cut short by ALS, with which he was diagnosed at the age of 21, when doctors gave him two years to live. Loss of mobility and speech forced Hawking to spend most of his life in a wheelchair that he could control with minimal muscle movement, and communicating via an electronic device.
“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus,” he said.
What a bonus it was though. His many achievements included turning physics on its head by finding that something does escape black holes. That something is Hawking radiation, but it only contains limited information of what initially fell in, leading to the information paradox: information loss is forbidden in quantum and classical physics, but seems apparent in black holes. Since Hawking’s death, however, research suggests information is not lost forever.
Fun fact: as if his scientific legacy was not enough, Hawking excelled as a science communicator and wrote several bestselling books pertaining to his field. The brilliant space scientist also possessed a wicked sense of humor and sharp wit, never failing to deliver a brazen, Twitter-ready wisecrack when needed. When then-UK prime minister, Theresa May, presented him with a lifetime achievement award in 2016, for example, Hawking wasted no time in retorting:
“I deal with tough mathematical questions every day, but please don’t ask me to help with Brexit.”
Hawking’s other undertakings included faking his own death, hosting a time traveler’s party a day before he announced it, and discussing the fate of One Direction in alternative universes.
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Impact and Legacy of Famous Space Scientists
We are now standing on the shoulders of giants, like Newton proclaimed, able to make out just how insignificant we are, but not yet having the capability to really expand our reach. However, while we have space scientists to thank for making us feel utterly puny, their research also points towards another way of looking at it. Yes, space might be huge and endless and filled with the most spectacular phenomena, as documented by the above scientists and more – but as far as the best telescopes can tell, we seem to be the only ones looking up at them. We might just be the rarest thing out there, even if our entire existence can be summed up by a tiny rock. Hawking says it best:
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”
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Featured image: Credit: NASA – Original. Source (StarChild Learning Center). Archived directory listing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1657641
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