Reaction Devices

This timeline, Reaction Devices, explores a simple, provocative concept; could the slightest of indirect changes in history lead to the destruction of the world in another timeline? This timeline explores that doomsday and the aftermath. The Point of Divergence in this timeline comes in 1903, when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices, a scientific work detailing the real possibilities and natures by which spaceflight could be achieved through rocket propulsion. Interestingly, he proposed the use of nuclear radiation as a powerful source of thrust.

In our timeline, Tsiolkovsky's work was virtually unknown, and his invaluable contribution to rocketry and nuclear physics went unnoticed for two decades, until Hermann Oberth published his thesis, By Rocket into Planetary Space, which sparked off mass interest in spaceflight, rocketry, and, by proxy, nuclear physics. In the timeline of Reaction Devices, however, Tsiolkovsky's work gains mass recognition when a travelling physicist brings his work back to Britain, where it becomes incredibly popular and spreads throughout the world's scientific community, sparking studies into rocketry and nuclear energy two decades earlier.