Turning the pages back... October 31, 1853 (10/26/97)

Turning the pages back...

October 31, 1853

On October 31, 144 years ago, Mykola Kybalchych was born in Korop, a town about 65 kilometers east of Chernihiv. He traveled to St. Petersburg to study at the Institute of Railroad Engineers and then at the Medical-Surgical Academy. While a student, he became involved in the anti-tsarist revolutionary underground.

In 1875, he was arrested, sent back to Ukraine and imprisoned in Kyiv's Lukianivka Prison for three years. Radicalized even further by his experience, a year after his release he joined the conspiratorial Narodnaia Volia and organized an explosives laboratory. This group's goal was to destroy the autocracy by assassinating leading government figures.

As the regime's repressive measures escalated, the organization's members became fixated on assassinating Tsar Alexander II. After a number of attempts, they succeeded, when a bomb built by Kybalchych killed the monarch in St. Petersburg on March 1, 1881.

Kybalchych was arrested, sentenced to death, and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress in the imperial capital. While awaiting his execution, he wrote a letter to the Academy of Sciences outlining his design of a rocket-propelled aircraft capable of rising beyond the earth's atmosphere. It is the first recorded proposal of its kind.

Prior to his final imprisonment, Kybalchych also developed the idea of jet propulsion, theoretically and experimentally, but hadn't time to work out the details. Although rudimentary, his ideas are basic to space travel.

Kybalchych was executed on April 15, 1881, at the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1970, a 92-meter crater at 3.0 N latitude and 146.5 W longitude in the moon's fifth quadrant was named after him.

Sources: "Kybalchych, Mykola," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); U.S. Geological Survey website, (http://www.flag.wr.usgs.gov/USGSFlag/space/nomen/moon/moonTOC.html)

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