NOTEWORTHY UKRAINIANS

Yurii Kondratiuk: scientist who foresaw moon landing

by Danylo Kulyniak

While it was long a dream of people to land on the moon, it was the pioneering genius of a Ukrainian scientist, Yurii Kondratiuk, that helped turn this dream into reality. After the historic landing on the moon by the Apollo 11 spaceship, an American scientist commented that their research was based on a small, inconspicuous book that had been published in the USSR.

The book's author, Kondratiuk, had calculated and substantiated the probability of landing on the moon using the following scheme: send a spacecraft into the moon's orbit; launch from the orbit to the moon; return to orbit and dock with the main spaceship; return to Earth. Life magazine wrote on March 31, 1969, that one of the creators of the Apollo program, John Guboit, had read about Kondratiuk calculations, done approximately 50 years prior to the first moon landing, that the best way to land on the moon was to separate a landing vehicle from the main spaceship.

In 1925 Kondratiuk, then an unknown clerk, sent a manuscript "On Interplanetary Travel" to Golovnauka, the highest scientific institution in the USSR. Though highly praised by experts, the manuscript did not arouse any further interest, so in January 1929 Kondratiuk published the manuscript at his own expense.

At the time he was working in Novosibirsk, one of the many places to which he had been forced to move by circumstances. Born and raised in Ukraine, the tempestuous times of his era had taken him to the front in the Great War, through the years of ruin after the civil war in Ukraine, and then on to a nearly rootless existence from the Caucasus, to Kyiv, to the Kirovograd region of Ukraine, then back to the Caucasus.

In the 1920s, he was building grain elevators for railway stations in Northern Ossetia; a few years later he was constructing granaries in remote Siberia and the Altai region. At the same time he somehow managed to constantly develop scientific theories that bore no relation to his daily work.

On July 31, 1930, he was accused, for no reason, of sabotage in his construction work, and as a result was imprisoned. In the spring of 1932 he was released from prison and allowed to return to Ukraine. In Kharkiv, Kondratiuk united a small group of scientists and completed the plans for a wind power plant to be erected on Ai-Petri mountain in Crimea. The project was never realized due to the death of his patron, Serhii Ordzhonikidze, but the designs and calculations associated with the project eventually helped build the Ostankino teletower in Moscow.

One can only wonder what inspired a 30-year-old Soviet clerk to perform precise calculations of future space routes and generate ideas that it would be possible to implement only many years after his death. Kondratiuk proposed and theoretically substantiated the possibility of reaching distant planets with the aid of landing modules that could separate from a multi-stage spaceship. He designed a special chair to facilitate lift-off; he pioneered parachute-assisted landing for modules (this method of landing is still in use, especially in Russia); he proposed the founding of long-term space bases, the setting up of interplanetary bases on artificial satellites of the Earth and the moon, designs employing solar energy; and many other ideas that were later realized - especially on Soviet space stations.

With the outbreak of war in 1941, Kondratiuk entered the army. He perished that same year, on October 3, as a rank and file signaler, while repairing a telephone line during an attack. History has preserved the memory of this talented individual by naming a giant crater on the dark side of the moon in his honor. In addition, a star and such earthly things as ships and streets have been named in his honor. This great inventor of the 20th century was memorialized also on philatelic issues.

More on Ukrainian space scientist

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 25, 1999, No. 30, Vol. LXVII

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