All Mathematicians and Optical Scientists Behind Space Science

Mathematicians, physicists and instrument makers of earlier centuries whose theory later underpinned orbital mechanics and astronomical instruments, even though they never worked on a rocket or a spacecraft. Colin Maclaurin, the Scottish mathematician and follower of Isaac Newton, worked out results on gravitation and the shape of rotating bodies, and Ernst Abbe, the German physicist who with Carl Zeiss and Otto Schott founded the science of modern optical instruments, laid the theory behind lenses used in telescopes. A person belongs here when the cited article calls them a mathematician, physicist or instrument maker and the atlas ties their work to the study of the sky or of motion in space. Astronomers and the rocketry theorists of individual countries have groups of their own.