ABSTRACT
Long before the launch of Sputnik 1 and the dawn of the space age in 1957, the Russian people had been prepared for its eventual coming. Public perception of space travel began forming in Russia near the beginning of the twentieth century under the same conditions as in other developed nations. Major advances in technology, new discov eries in physics, chemistry, and astronomy in the second half of the nineteenth century caused a dramatic reassessment of philosophical views on the place of human civilization in the universe. In the Russian Empire, where the Orthodox Christian philosophy was arbi trarily imposed on the public by the imperial government, that reassessment was not an easy task. Many Russian philosophers strug gled to find a compromise between their strong religious beliefs and new scientific facts. Yet, even the most hard-line religious proponents eventually had to accept the notion that the human race was not the center of God's creation but just one of perhaps many inhabited worlds in the Universe. This laid a foundation for philosophical justification of the idea of space flight.
