The Man Who Imagined and Calculated the Moon Landing

On July 20, 1969, the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, exploded with applause and cheers: the Eagle module of the Apollo-11 mission touched down on the dusty surface of the Moon. Few, however, knew that the path which brought Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Earth’s satellite had been decades before calculated and written down with a pencil in an ordinary school copybook by a Ukrainian man who was hiding from totalitarian terror. His name was Yuriy Kondratyuk. US President John F. Kennedy in November 1962 told NASA Administrator James Webb: “This is, whether we like it or not, a race. Everything we do [in space] ought to be tied into getting to the Moon ahead of the Russians.”JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The goal was clear, the path was not. According to the initial plan known as “Direct Ascent,” the mega-rocket Nova was supposed to land on the Moon and return to the Earth. But the physicists had every reason to argue that such a rocket would be excessively heavy and costly and would take more than a decade to build. There was an alternative concept called “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous” (LOR), which was offered and aggressively promoted by NASA engineer John Houbolt. In the LOR approach, a spacecraft would be inserted into the lunar orbit, a smaller lander would be dispersed to land on the Moon’s surface, have a rendezvous with the orbiting craft and return to the Earth. Other Topics of Interest 9/11: Geopolitical Legacy 25 Years On European editorial boards examined the geopolitical legacy, erosion of civil liberties, and political polarization 25 years after the 9/11 attacks. Dr. Houbolt became the most active and vocal advocate for the LOR approach, taking on the task of convincing the naysayers – within Langley, at the highest levels of NASA, Congress, and industry – that LOR was the only technique that would enable meeting the goal set by President Kennedy. What finally convinced them was the precise mathematical calculations presented by Dr. Houbolt. He claimed to have independently arrived at the concept, but never mentioned the fact that it was based on the calculations made several decades before by Oleksandr Sharhei, the Ukrainian known in world aerospace history as Yuriy Kondratyuk. The first detailed description of the LOR concept was given by Kondratyuk in his book “Conquering Interplanetary Spaces” which he published at his own expense in 1929. The book caught the eye of US intelligence and researchers who collected and thoroughly studied any technical literature they could obtain from behind the Iron Curtain and was immediately translated into English. The US engineers who read it were impressed by the mathematical elegance of Kondratyuk’s formulas: he did not just offer an idea but substantiated it with precise equations that proved the energy expediency of a lunar rendezvous. Who was Oleksandr Sharhei and why did he become Yuriy Knodratyuk? Oleksandr Sharhei was born on June 21, 1897, in Poltava. On his mother’s side, he was descended from the old German-Swedish noble family of the Schlippenbachs. His parents died when he was a child, so he was raised by his grandparents. In 1916, he graduated from a lyceum with honors and was admitted to the mechanics department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, but in a few months would be mobilized to the Russian army to fight in World War I. Oleksandr Sharhei, student of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, 1916 After a short course at an ensign school, Sharhei was deployed to the Caucasus where he fought against the Turkish troops until early 1918. In order to avoid Bolshevik repressions for his noble descent and rank in the Tsarist army, he used the ID of Yuriy Kondratyuk, a native of Lutsk who had died of tuberculosis. Only several people knew his secret and kept it for the rest of his life. In the 1920s, Oleksandr Sharhei – now Yuriy Kondratyuk – worked as a stoker, and then a mechanic in the south of Ukraine, Russia’s Kuban, North Caucasus and Siberia. In the town of Kamen (now Kamen-on-the-Ob, Altai Krai) a 13,000-ton wooden granary called “Mastodont” was built by his design – without a single nail. It functioned until the 1990s when it was destroyed by a fire. Kondratyuk never had an opportunity to complete his education and had no access to any laboratories or the international scientific community. He did all his research and calculations – from spaceflight trajectory and spacecraft design to the gravity assist concept (which was later used by the Voyager spacecraft) – in ordinary school notebooks, mostly at night by candlelight, hiding from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB). In his works “To Those Who Will Read to Build” (1919) and “Conquering Interplanetary Spaces” (1929) he derived the fundamental equation of rocket flight and examined the most energy-efficient trajectories. He was the first to formulate the theory of multistage rockets and propose the use of certain metals and nonmetals and their hydrogen compounds in rocket fuel. He examined the challenges of establishing intermediate interplanetary bases and put forward the idea of utilizing the gravitational fields of celestial bodies. In 1930, Kondratyuk was arrested on fabricated sabotage charges. Luckily, Soviet prosecutors failed to find enough evidence to jail him. After the release, he was allowed to work on wind farm projects in Crimea, Kharkiv and Moscow. Yuriy Kondratyk, 1939. Days after Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, Kondratyuk enlisted as a volunteer in the People’s Militia. He served as a telephone operator and later as a platoon commander’s assistant at the Reserve and Western Fronts. It is still unknown when or where he died. According to one account, private Kondratyuk was killed in action on Oct. 3, 1941. According to another, he died on Feb. 23 or 25, 1942, in the Oryol or Kaluga Oblast. A third account says that he was taken prisoner, worked with engineer Wernher von Braun on the world’s first ballistic missile V-2 and died in a German concentration camp. The fourth version is that he survived the war and died, forgotten by all, in 1952. The architecture of the successful Apollo mission that put the US ahead of the USSR in the space race was created by the Ukrainian man who struggled to survive under the terror of Soviet dictatorship. He calculated the optimal Earth-Moon trajectory which is known as the Kondratyuk Path and was successfully used by NASA in its Apollo program. John Houbolt recalled: “When I watched the launch of the rocket that carried the Apollo spaceship towards the moon at Cape Canaveral at dawn in March 1968 with a sinking heart, I was thinking at that time about the Ukrainian Yuriy Kondratyuk, who 50 years ago developed the same route on which our astronauts were supposed to fly.” A crater on the far side of the Moon and asteroid 3084 were named after Yuriy Kondratyuk. In 2014, he was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame of the Space History Museum in Alamogordo, NM. There is also a monument to him in Poltava. For his birth centennial, the National Bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin and the national post operator Ukrposhta issued stamps. Monument to Yuriy Kondratyuk in Poltava, Ukraine (Photo from open sources) Very regrettably, the name of the genial inventor is still little known in his own country. It is still less known that NASA’s Artemis program aiming at building a permanent base on the Moon is based on the fundamental principles of orbital mechanics formulated by Yuriy Kondratyuk. And the Orion rockets and SpaceX or Blue Origin landing systems use the logic of in-orbit docking that was devised almost a century ago by a young man from Poltava whose only resources were a pencil, paper, and boundless imagination.