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Yuriy Kondratyuk is a Ukrainian whose name is written in gold letters in the NASA Museum
Yuriy Kondratyuk is a world-famous Ukrainian scientist, innovator, pioneer, pioneer of astronautics. He was the author of many productive ideas, hypotheses and discoveries, in many ways ahead of his time. In fact, Yuri Kondratyuk turned out to be not only a great dreamer, but also an outstanding theorist who managed to substantiate the possibility and even the necessity of space flights at the beginning of the 20th century. All the proposals of Kondratyuk, set out in his works, were subsequently put into practice.
The main discoveries and achievements of Yuri Kondratyuk.
The Ukrainian scientist was, first of all, an enthusiast of his work. He never headed any major design bureaus, most life worked outside the profile, and also did not escape the sad fate of many of his colleagues - he was repressed and worked in the infamous "sharashka".
Wind energy. Yuri Kondratyuk became interested in a new trend in solving the energy problem - the use of wind energy - in 1932. Then the Ukrainian was serving a sentence under the article "sabotage" and worked as a design engineer in a specialized design office No. 14 in Novosibirsk. In this "sharashka", talented scientists, under the vigilant control of the OGPU, were engaged in the development of coal mines and enterprises. It was there that Yuri Vasilyevich learned about the conditions of the competition announced by the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry for the design of the largest wind farm in the USSR. In his free time from the rest of his work, prisoner Kondratyuk developed drawings, sketches, made necessary calculations and sent it to the People's Commissariat for specialists. He made several significant rationalization proposals that made it possible to increase energy production at lower costs. People's Commissar S. Ordzhonikidze personally liked the idea of Kondratyuk so much that the talented designer was urgently called from Siberia and given a job at a branch of the Institute of Industrial Energy, located in the capital Soviet Ukraine Kharkov.
In addition to Y. Kondratyuk, two of the most prominent designers of the USSR, P. K. Gorchakov and M. V. Nikitin (the author of the projects for the main building of Moscow State University and the Ostankino television tower), were also involved in the creation of the Crimean wind farm project. According to the developments of scientists, the new wind farm was to be built on the Crimean mountain Ai-Petri, the height of its tower was 160 m, and the diameter of the three-lane propeller was as much as 80 m. But even this was not the main thing. According to preliminary estimates, the future Crimean wind farm was supposed to have a capacity of 12 (!) thousand kilowatts, while any of its foreign analogues did not exceed only 100 kilowatts. However, in 1937, the construction of the power plant for unknown reasons was frozen, and the project was closed. Kondratyuk, as before, continued to work at the Institute of Industrial Energy, but since that time he has been developing smaller power plants.
Cosmonautics. Ideas about flights to other planets solar system, as well as the possibility of a person reaching the moon, occupied the scientist from the gymnasium bench. In his first book dedicated to this topic, “For those who will read in order to build”, published in the military year of 1919, Yuri Vasilyevich outlined his scientific credo: “First of all, so that the question of this work in itself does not frighten you and does not distract you from thinking about the possibility of implementation, all the time firmly remember that from the theoretical side, a rocket flight into world space is nothing incredible.
In this debut work, published only a year after the end of the First World War, the talented Ukrainian managed to derive the basic equation of motion space rocket, gave a description, and also posted a diagram of a four-stage rocket running on oxygen-hydrogen fuel. However, Kondratyuk's discoveries did not end there. The book also contains a description of the combustion chamber of a rocket engine, as well as many theoretical proposals, for example:
10 years later, in 1929, Yuri Vasilyevich published his second book, "The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces", brought him worldwide fame. In it, the scientist for the first time proposed a sequence of stages in the exploration of outer space. Kondratyuk proposed a vertical ascent of a rocket through the layers of the atmosphere with its subsequent entry into the Earth's orbit with a certain trajectory. Also, the Ukrainian scientist developed the concept of the return of the spacecraft, in fact, having developed a scheme for the future "space shuttle". In addition, Kondratyuk proposed sending a crew of three to the Moon: two in a special module should reach lunar surface, and the third is to stay in the ship in lunar orbit. 40 years later, during their flight to the moon, the Americans (N. Armstrong, M. Collins, E. Aldrin) acted according to the same scheme.
Biography of Yuri Kondratyuk.
1910-1916 - studied at the Second Poltava Men's Gymnasium, which he graduated with a silver medal.
September 1916 - entered the mechanical department of the Petrograd polytechnic institute, but studied there for only 40 days.
November 1916 - mobilized into the tsarist army.
1916-1918 - serves in the Russian army, participates in the First World War on the Transcaucasian front.
1918 - demobilized from the tsarist army, but on the way to Poltava he was again mobilized into the White Guard army of General Kornilov, from where he soon deserted.
1919-1925 - lives in Ukraine. First he works as a laborer in Poltava, then in Smila at an oil mill, then in the town of Malaya Viska - at a mill and at a sugar factory. He was forced to work at the menial jobs themselves and move from place to place, hiding his White Guard past.
1921 - received documents in someone else's name.
1925 - completes the manuscript "On Interplanetary Travel" and sends it to Moscow for review. The answer was positive.
1925 - works as a mechanic at the construction of an elevator in the Krasnodar Territory.
1926-1927 – works on the construction of an elevator in North Ossetia.
1927-1928 – is engaged in the design and construction of granaries in Western Siberia and in Altai.
Since 1928 - worked as deputy chief engineer of the Siberian regional office "Khleboprodukt". He is engaged in the design of the country's largest elevator "Mastodon", designed for 13 thousand tons of grain.
July 31, 1930 - Kondratyuk was arrested on charges of sabotage and sentenced to 3 years in prison.
1930-1932 - worked in the design bureau No. 14 in Kuzbass.
1932-1934 - released ahead of schedule at the personal request of S. Ordzhonikidze and transferred as an employee to the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Engaged in the design of the Crimean wind farm.
1934-1938 - Works at the Kharkov Institute of Industrial Energy.
1938 - the construction of the Crimean wind farm was suspended, but Kondratyuk was transferred to the position of head of the technical department of the wind sector at the Teploelektroproekt of the USSR People's Commissariat of Industry.
1941 - with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War At the age of 44, he volunteered to join the people's militia. Fights near Moscow and in other directions.
January 1942 - the latest information about Yu. V. Kondratyuk arrives. This is probably the time of his death.
"Shooting repulsed squads,
Interfering, they fall to dust.
Rosen leaves through the gorge,
Passionate Schlipenbach surrenders…”;
Historical memory of Yuri Kondratyuk.
One of the streets in Kyiv was named after Y. Kondratyuk.
Monuments to Y. Kondratyuk were erected in Poltava, in the city of Gorishni Plavni, Poltava region.
A monument to Y. Kondratyuk was erected at the Canaveral Cosmodrome in the USA.
Memorial plaques in honor of Y. Kondratyuk were installed in Kharkov, Poltava, St. Petersburg.
The Federation of Cosmonautics of Ukraine and Russia issued a commemorative medal in honor of Yu. V. Kondratyuk.
The Federation of Cosmonautics of Ukraine has established a diploma named after Kondratyuk, which is awarded to talented scientists, designers, as well as veterans of the rocket and space industry.
In 1997, a commemorative coin was issued depicting Yu. V. Kondratyuk, as well as stamps.
The asteroid 3084 Kondratyuk is named after the scientist.
American astronauts named one of the craters on reverse side Moon named after Kondratyuk.
In 2001, the Aviation and Cosmonautics Museum in Poltava was named after Kondratyuk.
Yuri Kondratyuk in social networks.
Documentary:
How often do Yandex users from Ukraine search for information about Yuriy Kondratyuk?
To analyze the popularity of the query "Yuri Kondratyuk", the Yandex wordstat.yandex search engine service is used, from which we can conclude: as of September 8, 2016, the number of requests per month was 1732, which can be seen on the screen:
Since the end of 2014, the largest number of inquiries from Yuri Kondratyuk was registered in April 2016 – 3,276 inquiries per month.
Shargei Alexander Ignatievich (Kondratyuk Yuri Vasilyevich)June 21, 1897
The life of this man with a polyvariant biography is worthy of a monumental book and film.
Alexander Ignatievich Shargei was born in Poltava on June 21, 1897. His father was a Jewish Catholic, and his mother was Baroness German Ludmila Schlippenbach. In 1916 he entered the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. But it failed to finish. In the same year, Shargei was drafted into the army. In the rank of ensign, he honestly fought on the Turkish front.
In 1918 he returned to Poltava. And he wrote a long-thought-out little book, which he published at his own expense in Kyiv, "To those who will read in order to build." In it, he described and accurately calculated the flight of a controlled spacecraft to the moon. With the launch of the spacecraft into lunar orbit by a rocket, the landing of a shuttle with a man on the surface of the satellite, with the return of astronauts to Earth, using the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Moon for additional acceleration and deceleration. The time for publication was not the best.
Then fate made an unexpected somersault. During the Civil War, Shargei was drafted into the Volunteer Army. However, he did not want to fight and deserted. Poltava was occupied by the Reds. Shargei was threatened with a visit from Chekists and arrest. But the documents of a coeval who died of tuberculosis, a simple Ukrainian, passed to him in a neighborly way. And Shargei lived the rest of his life under the name of Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk.
He began to roam all over the country, working as a worker and earning fame for himself as a talented engineer. In 1927, Kondratyuk ended up in Novosibirsk. In the town of Kamen-na-Obi, it was necessary to save the grain crop in the absence of an elevator and building materials. Kondratyuk, according to his project, without a single nail, built the Mastodon wooden elevator, which served for more than 60 years.
In 1929 he published his second book, The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces. He was arrested as a pest, but he worked in a Tomsk sharashka. Then he worked in the Crimea, where, according to his project, the construction of a powerful wind farm began, but was not completed.
At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Kondratyuk volunteered for the front and died in 1942.
When the Americans landed on the moon in 1969, they themselves admitted that the calculation of their flight exactly coincided with the calculation made by Shargei-Kondratyuk half a century before. During his visit to Novosibirsk, the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, reverently collected earth in a bag near the house where Kondratyuk lived.
There is a version that during the war Kondratyuk did not die, but was captured. Some of the Germans turned out to be familiar with his works. As a result, Kondratyuk began working at the Design Bureau of Wernher von Braun, where they thought not only about V-rockets, but also plotted to aim at space. After the war, the secret Kondratyuk, together with chief von Braun, worked in the United States. And lunar project America is largely his brainchild.
There is hardly a person in the history of astronautics whose life would be as mysterious and contain as many secrets as the life of a person who entered science under the name of Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, along whose “track” in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Americans flew to the moon.
But under this name, as it turned out later, a stranger to himself, he lived only half of his life. The real name of this man is Alexander Ignatievich Shargei.
"For those who will read to build"
Alexander Ignatievich Shargei was born on June 9 (June 21, according to a new style) in 1897 in the city of Poltava (Ukraine) in the family of Ignatius Benediktovich and Lyudmila Lvovna Shargeev. The father left the family shortly after the birth of Alexander, the mother suffered from a nervous breakdown and died in an asylum for the mentally ill around 1910. Little Sasha was brought up in the family of his grandmother Ekaterina Kirillovna and grandfather Akim Nikitich Datsenko. Due to existing life circumstances it was they, the grandfather and grandmother, who became his educators and real parents. Childhood and youthful years of the future scientist passed in Poltava in the atmosphere of Ukrainian patriarchal way of life.
From 1910 to 1916, Alexander studied at the 2nd Poltava Men's Gymnasium and graduated with a silver medal. In the same year, he entered the mechanical department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute (now St. Petersburg State politechnical University). However, he did not study there for long, until November, when he was drafted into the army and enrolled in the ensign school at one of the St. Petersburg cadet schools.
Even in high school, Shargei became interested in the problem of interplanetary flights. During the short months of study at the Polytechnic Institute, he continued to work in this direction, and a few years later he completed a manuscript devoted to these issues - "To those who will read in order to build" (1918-1919). In this work, independently of Tsiolkovsky, he original method derived the basic equation of rocket motion, gave a diagram and description of a four-stage rocket on oxygen-hydrogen fuel, an engine combustion chamber with a staggered and other arrangement of oxidizer and fuel injectors, a paraboloidal nozzle, and much more. He proposed using atmospheric drag to slow down the rocket during descent in order to save fuel; when flying to other planets, put the ship into orbit of its artificial satellite, and to land a person on them and return to the ship, use a small take-off and landing ship (the proposal was implemented in the Apollo program); use the gravitational field of oncoming celestial bodies for additional acceleration or deceleration spacecraft when flying in the solar system (perturbation maneuver). In the same work, the possibility of using solar energy to power the onboard systems of spacecraft was considered, as well as the possibility of placing on earth orbit large mirrors to illuminate the surface of the Earth.
But back to the fate of Alexander Shargei. Before demobilization in March 1918, he fought on the Turkish front. After October revolution, as an officer of the tsarist army, was mobilized into the White Army, but deserted from it. He lived in Kyiv, but it is not known exactly what he did during this period. Probably, he simply "survived" in the "crucible of the Civil War", like millions of other people.
At the end of 1919, Alexander again "fell" under mobilization. In order not to fight in the White Army, on the way from Kyiv to Odessa, he fled from the military echelon, having lost all his documents. For some time he was hiding in a semi-legal position with close people in the town of Malye Viski, near Kiev.
"Birth" Kondratyuk
When the Bolsheviks firmly settled in power, Alexander Shargei realized what the past threatened him with. royal officer. At the insistence of his stepmother, the second wife of his father, Elena Petrovna Giberman, who loved and respected her stepson very much, Alexander Shargei accepts documents in the name of George (in Orthodox pronunciation - Yuri) Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, who was three years younger than Alexander.
A few words about the man who gave his name to Alexander Shargei. The real Kondratyuk was born on August 13 (August 26, according to the new style), 1900 in the city of Lutsk, Volyn province (Ukraine). He studied at Kiev University, and on March 1, 1921 he died of pulmonary tuberculosis. His brother Vladimir Vasilyevich Kondratyuk taught in one of Kiev schools, in which Alexander's half-sister, Nina Ignatievna Shargey, studied. Elena Petrovna persuaded Kondratyuk to hand over the documents of his deceased brother to Alexander. Only a few people knew this secret and kept it for many years.
Elena Petrovna told her daughter Nina only before her death. In 1977, Nina Ignatievna Shargei gave a written testimony to the Special Commission about the circumstances of the change of name and surname by her half-brother Alexander Ignatievna Shargei.
From 1921 to 1927, the newly minted Kondratyuk worked in southern Ukraine, the Kuban and the North Caucasus, starting as an oiler and wagon trailer and ending as a mechanic at an elevator. In 1927, Kondratyuk was invited to Novosibirsk to work at Khleboprodukt.
Yuri Vasilyevich's experience in the mechanization of elevators in the Kuban and the North Caucasus came in handy in Siberia. His first “object” was a wooden gravity elevator being built in the village of Rubtsovka in the Altai Territory (now the city of Rubtsovsk), one of the four largest elevators in Siberia at that time with a capacity of 100,000 pounds. Mechanization, major construction- all this was to Kondratyuk's liking. Some of his inventions were introduced into production even before he received a patent or copyright certificate, for which innovators were often fined. Such a story, for example, turned out with the Kondratyuk bucket and its elevator scales. Obviously, they were satisfied with his first work in Rubtsovka, and in the future he was entrusted with several objects.
By Decree No. 35 of September 12, 1927, “Yu.V. Kondratyuk, a technician for the construction of elevators,” according to his request, “is transferred from Rubtsovka to work on the mechanization of barns in Biysk, Rubtsovka, Pospelikha and Shipunovo with residence in Novosibirsk.”
In those years, Kondratyuk also participated in the construction of the famous Mastodon elevator - a granary for 10,000 tons, built without a single nail. This work later became the reason for the arrest of Yuri Vasilyevich. But we will talk about this fact in his biography a little later.
However, while building elevators, Yuri Vasilyevich never forgot about his "first love" - space. In 1929, he published in Novosibirsk at his own expense with a circulation of 2,000 copies the book "The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces", in which the sequence of the first stages of space exploration was determined. The issues raised in his early work"To those who will read to build." In particular, in the book it was proposed to use rocket-artillery systems to supply satellites in near-Earth orbit (at present, this proposal, of course, has been implemented in a modified form in transport system"Progress"). In addition, the paper investigated the issues of thermal protection of spacecraft during their movement in the atmosphere.
It is curious that in the preface to the book, Kondratyuk mentions several chapters of the manuscript that are "too close to the working project of mastering the world's spaces - too close to be published without knowing in advance who will use this data and how." Since unknown chapters have not yet been found and are unlikely to ever be discovered, it is not possible to judge what was actually there.
The author himself claims that he has found a way to achieve initial speed rockets 1500-2000 m / s "without spending the charge and at the same time without the use of a grandiose artillery gun." According to him, he also "came to a very unexpected solution to the problem of equipping a line of communication from Earth to space and back, for the implementation of which the use of such a rocket, as considered in this book, is necessary only once."
Kondratyuk also pointed out that many of the technical solutions can already be implemented achieved level advances in technology, especially by the Americans.
But he had to wait several more decades for his proposals to gradually find application in rocket science and astronautics in the USSR and the USA. And that's not all. Some of Kondratyuk's ideas are still waiting in the wings.
Due to the fact that the book was published far from Moscow in a very small circulation, it could not have a significant impact on the development of real samples. rocket technology and practical astronautics. And, although in 1947 the book was republished by the Oborongiz publishing house, it never received widely known. At present, it can only be considered in the historical aspect.
ARREST
Meanwhile, life forced Kondratyuk to devote time to issues not related to space exploration, although, as he himself wrote, everything he did besides this was “only a way to earn money for further research in the area of access to extraterrestrial space".
On July 30 (according to other sources - July 31), 1930, Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, along with several other employees of Khleboprodukt, was arrested on charges of sabotage. One of the charges was that he built the "Mastodon" already mentioned here, not only without drawings, which in itself was a serious violation of the rules of construction, but also without nails. The local authorities came to the conclusion that the structure could not withstand such an amount of grain and would fall apart, destroying 10,000 tons of products.
On May 10, 1931, Kondratyuk was sentenced to three years in the camps (the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, by its decision No. OS-70-8 of March 26, 1970, rehabilitated Kondratyuk "due to the lack of corpus delicti"). However, instead of the camps, Yuri Vasilievich was recruited to work in the specialized bureau No. 14 formed in Novosibirsk for the design of coal enterprises (the prototype of future "sharashkas"). There he worked until August 1932, having managed to obtain a patent and a copyright certificate in the field of mining equipment. He published articles on a number of special problems: speeding up and facilitating the sinking of mines with formwork mechanization of concrete and rock removal, concrete storage high resistance and permanent lining of mine shafts, reinforced concrete pile driver.
While still working at Bureau No. 14, Kondratyuk got acquainted with the terms of the competition for the preliminary design of a powerful Crimean wind power plant (WPP), announced by the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry. The project of the station was carried out in collaboration with P.K. Gorchakov, and later the engineer N.V. Nikitin, the future creator of the Ostankino TV tower in Moscow. The preliminary design of the wind farm was completed in November 1932, and soon the authors of the project received permission from the GPU to travel to Moscow.
At the insistent request of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry, in 1933 Kondratyuk was released from deportation ahead of schedule. At the competition, the project was recognized as the best. The final technical design was finalized by mid-February 1934. In 1937, on Mount Ai-Petri in the Crimea, according to the prepared working drawings, the construction of the foundation of the station began.
However, already in 1938, it was decided to stop the design and construction of powerful wind farms. In this regard, in the next two years, Kondratyuk had to design small experimental wind power plants in the Design and Experimental Office of Wind Power Plants (PEKVES) of the Volgoelecgrosetstroy trust of the People's Commissariat of Power Plants of the USSR.
It should be noted that only half a century later, mankind began to return to the idea of using the wind as an environmentally friendly pure source energy. But even today it is still impossible to say that wind energy has become "an integral part of our life."
In the mid-1930s, Yuri Kondratyuk received an offer of cooperation from Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. Despite the temptation of working on rockets, he refused. Apparently, the reason was that the work on military projects provided for tight control by the NKVD. When checking the biography, the fact of forgery of documents and the White Guard past with all the ensuing consequences (prison or execution) could be revealed. Therefore, Yuri Vasilyevich decided to continue his activities in another area, where the "look" of the Chekists was not so "close".
Perhaps he would have worked fruitfully for a long time for the benefit of domestic wind energy (or in some other area), if not for the Great Patriotic War that began on June 22, 1941...
WAR
On July 6, 1941, he enlisted in the ranks of the people's militia and served in the communications company of the 2nd rifle regiment divisions of the people's militia of the Kiev region of Moscow (21st division of the people's militia). On the night of July 7, the division set out on foot from Moscow and went to the front.
For three months, the fighters built defensive structures near the city of Kirov (the former Smolensk, now the Kaluga region), and on October 3, 1941 (by that time all the people's volunteer militias had already been enrolled in the ranks of the Red Army in the 173rd rifle division) took their first fight there.
The further fate of Kondratyuk is unknown. Like tens and hundreds of thousands of other fighters, he is listed as missing.
There is no information about what happened to Yuri Vasilyevich at the front, where he laid down his head, where he was buried. And the lack of information, as is often the case, is a good "reason" for various kinds of conjectures and conjectures.
MYSTERY OF DOOM
The secret of the death of Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk was tried many times to reveal.
The first time they became interested in his fate in 1942 in Smersh. Then they found out the fate of all those who perished in bloody meat grinder during the first months of the war. Specialists were most interested in the question whether Kondratyuk was taken prisoner, like millions of other our fellow citizens? It was not possible to find any data on this subject, so Yuri Vasilyevich was included in the list irretrievable losses Red Army. The "funeral" was not sent, because when joining the ranks of the people's militia, Kondratyuk wrote that he had no relatives to whom he should have sent it in the event of his death.
For the second time, the fate of Kondratyuk became interested in post-war years when the USSR Ministry of Defense carried out a large-scale campaign to clarify Soviet losses during the war years. Again, everyone who was listed as missing was checked. Their data was searched for in the lists of those who were in captivity, who collaborated with the Germans in the occupied territory, who deserted from the Red Army, and in other similar lists. None of them contained the name of Kondratyuk, which gave grounds to confirm his death. Truth, the exact date death could not be determined. But back then it wasn't considered that important.
The next time the "blank spots" in the biography of Yuri Vasilievich were clarified in the 1960s, after the Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the naming of formations on the far side of the moon made a proposal to assign the name of Kondratyuk to one of the craters on the "face" of our celestial neighbor . By that time, the name of Yuri Vasilyevich was already well known to the scientific community. Therefore, the scientific community met this offer with enthusiasm.
However, according to the then practice, this issue required approval by the Central Committee of the CPSU, where the documents from the Academy of Sciences were sent. The entry in the questionnaire - "missing" - a little embarrassed party officials. But the answer from the USSR Ministry of Defense, in which the fact of Kondratyuk's death was confirmed, satisfied the functionaries. Central Committee, and they gave the green light to naming one of the craters on the far side of the Moon after Kondratyuk. The International Astronomical Union approved this proposal.
The name of Kondratyuk attracted attention again in March 1969, when David Sheridan published an article in the American Life magazine "How an idea that no one wanted to admit turned into a lunar module." In it, he spoke in detail about how and why the Americans chose the flight scheme for the Apollo program, which included the launch of the main module of the ship into a selenocentric orbit, and the landing of astronauts on the surface of the Moon in the lunar module.
This idea was put forward by NASA engineer John Houbolt back in the early 1960s, but was met with hostility. Wernher von Braun, who led the work on the Apollo program, categorically declared: “It’s not good!”
However, Houbolt did not give up and continued to beat the thresholds of all NASA committees. But it was all in vain! Until, in the fall of 1961, he wrote a desperate letter to NASA Deputy Director Robert Siemens: "Give us permission and we will get people to the moon in very short order."
Siemens liked the letter, and most importantly, the author's conviction that he was right. He accepted Houbolt's idea, passed the letter on to his aides at NASA headquarters in Washington, and recommended "support" for the proposal. And all those who previously did not even want to listen to Houbolt suddenly became his allies overnight.
Later information was leaked to the press to solve this problem. difficult problem the book of the Russian scientist Yuri Kondratyuk helped. One of the leaders of NASA, Dr. Low, said: “We found a small, inconspicuous book published in Russia immediately after the revolution. Its author substantiated and calculated energy profitability landing on the Moon according to the scheme "flight to the Moon's orbit - launch to the Moon from orbit - return to orbit and docking with the main ship - flight to Earth". Dr. Low "slightly" made a mistake in dating: Yuri Kondratyuk's book was published in 1929, that is, 12 years after the revolution, which is far from "immediately after." But these are “little things” that can be “forgiven” to the Americans.
Perhaps Houbolt himself came to such a decision. It happens. In any case, Life ends the essay on John Hoobolt with this paragraph: “As he watched the launch of Apollo 9, on board which his brainchild, the lunar module, was sent, Houbolt thought of another engineer whose dreams were dashed by skeptics. Houbolt recently read the story of Yuri Kondratyuk, a self-taught Russian mechanic who calculated half a century ago that the lunar orbit docking method was best method solution to the problem of landing on the moon. Soviet government neglected them ... "My God! He went through all the same things that I did, - said Houbolt "..."
Houbolt's statement became the starting point for the appearance in the Western tabloid press (there was simply no Russian tabloid press then) of the assumption that Yuri Kondratyuk did not die in the war, but was captured, worked together with Wernher von Braun in Peenemünde, and after After the end of World War II, he moved across the ocean, where he turned into ... John Houbolt. As an argument, supporters of this version cited the fact that after the war in Peenemünde, Yuri Kondratyuk's handwritten notebook with formulas and calculations on rocket technology was discovered.
Indeed, such a notebook was found in the German missile center after the defeat Nazi Germany. But how she got there is a mystery, which is now unlikely to be solved.
Most likely, the notebook was found in the personal belongings of the nameless Soviet soldier, whose corpse the Germans found on the battlefield in February 1942. Knowing the pedantry of the Germans and their desire for order, it can be assumed that the trophy teams handed over a strange notebook with many formulas “as intended”. So she ended up in Peenemünde. But it was the notebook that hit, and not the author of the notes, who was already dead by that time.
Be that as it may, both Sheridan's article and publications in the Western press did not go unnoticed in the Soviet Union. Especially the assumption that Kondratyuk did not die, but went over to the side of the Germans. This time they took him seriously.
The Chekists approached the "question" with their characteristic thoroughness. The documents of the period of the Great Patriotic War were again studied, the information that he himself indicated in numerous questionnaires was rechecked. It was then that some “strange things” in his biography “surfaced”.
For example, it turned out that Kondratyuk's name was not on the list of students who were enrolled in the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute in 1916. But there is a student with a different surname - Shargey, who filled out an application for admission to the institute in Kondratyuk's handwriting.
Further more. We got to the bottom of the school of ensigns, and to serve in the White Army. Found the relatives of Shargei-Kondratyuk. It was already mentioned above that his half-sister Nina Ignatievna Shargei in 1977 gave written witness's testimonies about the circumstances of her brother's surname change.
The “investigation” was conducted for several years, and by the end of the 1970s, those who “should have” already knew exactly who Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk really was. But it was decided to hide information from the general public. Moreover, nothing reprehensible was found in the biography of Kondratyuk-Shargei. Well, the change of surname is not a coloring fact, of course, but this could be understood, given the role that the official Soviet historiography assigned Kondratyuk in the conquest of space.
But even such a thorough investigation conducted by the KGB did not allow answering three important questions: when, where and how did Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk die? In the early 1980s, his relatives, colleagues and enthusiasts took up the clarification of this issue. They did not have information from the Chekists, they did not know about the decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU to hide the circumstances of the change of Shargei's surname, therefore they acted as best they could - through the Central Archive of the USSR Ministry of Defense (TsAMO). More recently, these documents have been made publicly available.
Based on the testimonies of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, a certificate was issued (Certificate of TsAMO No. 9/548512 dated December 8, 1987), in which the date of death of Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk was named October 3, 1941.
The same testimony "contributed" to the fact that Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk was "buried" in a mass grave on Krasny Bor Street in the city of Kirov, Kaluga Region. Whose remains were given this name is still unknown.
But the fact that Kondratyuk is not buried there can already be absolutely certain, since the study of other documents allows us to say that Yuri Vasilyevich was alive in October, and in November, and in December 1941, and in January 1942. This is evidenced by his autographs in the distribution lists of the 1st communications battalion of the 1281st rifle regiment, as well as a letter dated January 2, 1942, which Kondratyuk sent to G.P. Pletneva.
New evidence that was found in 1990 made it possible to clarify the date and place of Kondratyuk's death. But, I will make a special mention of this, only to clarify, and not to make this fact indisputable.
It is currently believed that Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk died on February 25, 1942. This date can be found in all modern reference books. Whether it will be "final" is hard to say. Especially considering that now more and more new archives are being revealed. So, there is an extra chance to clarify what remains unknown.
The fate of Alexander Ignatievich Shargei is amazing and tragic. He was self-taught, but now his work is recognized all over the world, and he rightfully ranks among the pioneers of world astronautics.
On October 18, 2014 in the city of Alamogordo in the state of New Mexico, USA, at the Museum of the History of Space Exploration, Yuri Kondratyuk was admitted to the Gallery of International Space Glory (news on the museum website). There are now 167 people in the Gallery. Most personalities are Americans and residents European countries. In addition to Kondratyuk, scientists from our country are represented in it: scientists K. Tsiolkovsky, S. Korolev, A. Isaev, V. Parin, F. Zander, M. Tikhonravov, N. Kibalchich and cosmonauts Yu. Gagarin, E. Leonov, V. Tereshkova , V. Polyakov, M. Manarov, V. Titov, S. Krikalev, V. Kubasov, S. Savitskaya. Together with Kondratyuk, science fiction writers Herbert Wells and Jules Verne, NASA engineer, developer lunar program John Houbolt and others.
In pursuit of the moon
Kondratyuk Yuri Vasilyevich (1897-1942)
one of the founders of Russian cosmonautics. At the beginning of the 20th century, he calculated the optimal flight path to the Moon.
Printed from the book:
"Creators": Essays on people who inscribed their name in the history of Novosibirsk. T.I. pp. 210-221.
Compiled by N. A. Alexandrov; Editor E. A. Gorodetsky.
Novosibirsk: Club of Patrons, 2003. - V.1. - 512 p.; T.2. - 496 p.
What comes to mind first , when it comes to domestic cosmonautics? We were the first to launch a satellite. The first astronaut in the history of mankind is ours. Before the rest, we went to outer space. The names that instantly pop up in the mind at the word "space" are Gagarin, Korolev, Tsiolkovsky. Certainly this the greatest people of their time, books have been written about them, films have been made - they are familiar to us from the school bench.
What do we know about Kondratyuk? Well, there was such a design engineer, he also invented something ... that's probably all. Meanwhile, he was not only a brilliant scientist, but also amazing person very difficult, even tragic fate who played with him bad joke. A self-taught genius, a sad knight, in love with Heaven, but forced to live under a false name and engage in a business alien to him, who never fulfilled his goal. cherished dream. It is not surprising that we know so little about Kondratyuk: for many years his name was completely erased from history. Then, fortunately, Kondratyuk was still remembered - but there were “blank spots” in his biography for a long time. And the most important mystery was the riddle of the name.
However, let's talk about everything in order.
On June 21, 1897, a boy was born in Poltava in the family of a student and teacher of the city gymnasium. “Alexander Ignatievich Shargei,” the official wrote on the birth certificate.
Sasha's childhood can hardly be called happy: shortly after giving birth, his mother became seriously ill and was sent to a colony for the mentally ill, from where she never returned. Father, " eternal student", without finishing his studies, he died in 1910 from a sudden and terrible disease. The upbringing of the orphaned boy had to be taken up by his grandparents.
Interest in different kind mechanisms, their structure, as well as the ability to read fluently and quickly count, were noticed in him very early. Sasha's favorite pastime was reading. Having asked for “something about technology”, he hid in the garden and studied rather complicated textbooks and books, after which tin mills, steamboats and steam locomotives appeared ...
“Is it possible to replace the spring with something so that the plant does not end?” he thought one day, looking at his grandfather's gramophone. Everything that he would invent much later would begin with a similar question: "How to make it better, more rational, more efficient?"
But that will happen later. In the meantime, the 19-year-old high school student is finishing classes with a silver medal - needless to say, he achieved special success in physics and mathematics, having studied a mountain of books on these subjects. By the end of the sixth year of study, in addition to the invented water and steam turbines, a caterpillar car and a watch with a long winding, Alexander already had his first own manuscript on space flights - four student notebooks, sewn together and written in pencil.
From the age of 16,- he will write in a few years to Tsiolkovsky, - ever since I determined the feasibility of leaving the Earth, achieving this has become the goal of my life.
It is difficult to say what at one time caused the boy to look only at the sky, at the boundless outer space. But on the ground he was cramped. Even as a child, having designated as his goal the achievement of other planets, he remained faithful to her to the end and went to this goal with incredible perseverance. It's hard to even imagine what the most rapid rise expected this man, if not for the war and the revolution.
As soon as Alexander Shargei, now a student of the mechanical department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, began his studies, he was called to the front. The First World War was on. And then came 1917, which became a turning point for millions of people, radically changing their lives.
Wherever fate threw Alexander, but in 1918 he ended up with Denikin. Documents were taken from him, of course. But he did not want to fight for the “white cause”, and once, when the train moved to Odessa, he simply “left behind” him. The price of escape was his given name. Meanwhile, in a country where there was a brutal civil war, it was extremely dangerous to be in such an illegal position. For some time, Alexander lived with various relatives and acquaintances, but this could not continue for a long time. Something had to be done.
An opportunity presented itself in 1921. Stepmother Alexandra obtained from one of her acquaintances the documents of the recently deceased ... Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk. From that very day, Shargei became Kondratyuk. Moreover, he took not only the name, but also the year and place of birth of the deceased (1900, Lutsk), “rejuvenating”, thus, by three years. We only know about the real Yuri Kondratyuk that he was a student at one of the universities who died at the age of 21 from consumption.
So the past has been erased. A completely different life began - under a false name. Yuri Vasilievich - let's now call him that - was very burdened by his forced "illegal" position. Since then, the fear of exposure has become his constant companion, because if his White Guard past came up, it’s hard to even imagine what consequences this could have. The stigma of the White Guard was actually equal to the stigma of a suicide bomber.
Despite this twist of fate, life went on. Naturally, there was no question of further study. And the most talented researcher of space flights was forced not only to take someone else's name, but also to do something other than what he dreamed of. Whoever he happened to work in the first years of the Soviet Republic - from a greaser and wagon coupler to an elevator mechanic. The latter, in fact, became his main profession for many years. But forced hardships and troubles did not break this man. He spent all his free time from work reading books and the main work of his life - the theoretical study of space flights.
In 1925, Kondratyuk went to Moscow in the hope of publishing his work and gaining recognition. In Gosizdat he was received rather coolly and sent to Glavnauka. “Okay, we will show your work to specialists,” Kondratyuk was promised there. “If everyone approves of her, then…”
The following year, Kondratyuk received a review from mechanical engineer Vladimir Petrovich Vetchinkin. Vetchinkin wrote that the brilliant work should be published immediately, and Yuri Vasilyevich himself should be transferred to serve in the capital, creating all the conditions for work. However, despite such a response, they were in no hurry to publish the manuscript. A long haul began. A year has passed, another. During this time, nothing moved from the dead center, Moscow soon lost interest in Kondratyuk. Everyone except Vetchinkin.
And the unknown self-taught genius remained an ordinary engineer. However, no, of course, not ordinary. He never did anything slipshod. Everything he touched became surprisingly harmonious, wonderful, ingenious. All his efforts served one thing - to benefit people. And it worked out great for him.
AT different time Yu. V. Kondratyuk worked in Ukraine, Kuban, North Caucasus. And in 1927 he left for far Novosibirsk.
The Novosibirsk period of Kondratyuk's life is closely connected with the Gorchakov family. Before coming to our city, Kondratyuk worked as a senior mechanic at the Elkhotovsky elevator in North Ossetia. Petr Kirillovich Gorchakov, one of the leaders of the Khleboprodukt association, invited him to this position at one time. They worked well together, got to know each other well, and when the construction of the elevator was completed and Gorchakov was transferred to the Siberian regional office of Khleboprodukt, he invited his comrade and colleague to go with him. So Kondratyuk ended up in our city.
But before arriving here, he stopped by the same in Moscow, where, alas, there was still no hurry to publish his work. In the capital, he first met the future professor V.P. Vetchinkin. It is not difficult to guess what they talked about for several hours in a row - of course, about interstellar flights. Vetchinkin promised to edit Kondratyuk's manuscript and write a preface, which he was immensely happy about.
And, of course, Yuri Vasilievich could not help but run through bookstores capital Cities. In one of them, he bought a brand new "Engineering Handbook", which he took with him to Novosibirsk and which became his table book. It is this shabby book with a lot of notes by the scientist that is now stored in our museum of local lore.
In Siberia, Kondratyuk continues his usual work - the construction and mechanization of elevators. New structures had to be erected throughout the region and even beyond its borders; wherever he has been! In those days, there was probably not a single large elevator that would not be “familiar” with Yuri Vasilyevich. The work went well - after all, the experience of Kondratyuk the engineer was not to occupy. But there was too little time left for interplanetary space. Actually, Kondratyuk spent very little time in Novosibirsk itself: his work consisted of continuous business trips. But it was not a burden to him, he never complained to anyone - probably not even to himself. He didn’t even like the word “rest”, wondering: how can this be just rest without doing anything? Yes, who among the workers of that time could have imagined that this inconspicuous-looking man in an unchanged canvas robe, with the hands of a hard worker stained with machine oil, deduces the most complex formulas at night and is carried away by thought into the unknown depths of space ...
But back to Gorchakov. He, his wife Olga Nikolaevna and daughter Lucy became, perhaps, the only people close to him in a foreign city. “Kondratyuk was our friend,” Olga Nikolaevna recalls. Yurich, Yurisik, Yurochka - that's what we called him. We loved and appreciated Yuri Vasilyevich. Over the years, he has become not only a friend, but also a member of our family.”
And, despite the fact that work - both "bread" and "space" - took Kondratyuk most of the time, he still managed to find sometimes an hour or two to take his soul in the circle of close people, which brought great joy not only them, but also to himself.
No, he was not a recluse who was not interested in anything other than mathematical calculations. Every time he managed to visit the Gorchakovs, it was a small celebration. Everyone - including the guest - began to joke, have fun, make fun of each other. Particularly loved the variety Mind games, one of which, invented by themselves, consisted in the fact that someone composed poems about each of those present, while the rest had to guess who in question. Here is one of those descriptive poems:
Scares and worries
Your wild look
You are overgrown and not shaved,
What's gnawing at your heart?
You are somewhere
In pursuit of the moon...
Throw away childhood dreams
Take care of earthly life...
It is not difficult to guess who this impromptu is about. Those who composed it knew Yuri Nikolayevich well, knew and loved him. And - perhaps without realizing it - somewhere in the depths of their souls they still believed that the time would come when his "dreams" would come true. It is a pity that Kondratyuk himself will no longer be in this world ...
How did the people of Novosibirsk remember this man? Here is one of his most typical portraits: He was tall, thin, had large, black, lively eyes, wavy hair and a small goatee. He was very humble, friendly, tactful and discreet person. He never allowed himself a rude tone. Yuri Vasilyevich dressed very simply. This is how the draftswoman from Gorchakov's group remembered him.
Talking with Yuri Vasilyevich was a real pleasure, - writes in his memoirs one of Kondratyuk's colleagues . He was richly endowed with a sense of humor. His thoughts were sharp, quick and brilliant.
In the eyes of colleagues, neighbors and acquaintances, he looked like a kind of Don Quixote. The same strange, sometimes dressed somewhat ridiculous. The knight of a sad image, who chose the "lady of the heart" the Moon - his Dulcinea. But everyone loved him, affectionately called some "our Yurich", some simply "nice person." Often in the early morning he could be found sleeping at his desk - "he got carried away with the task", sat up too long.
Absent-mindedness and strangeness are the qualities of scientists that have long become a byword. Yuri Vasilievich was no exception. He could, for example, mechanically eat a plate of cookies put on the table for everyone, he could eat soup mixed with sugar or something else sweet. And once he sat down right on a hot cake, just taken out of the oven. Neighbors complained that, going to work in the morning and passing by their house, Yuri, in thought, now and then hit his head on the shutters, which were closed from this. "I'll fix it," he promised each time. But the next day it all happened again.
The reason for this absent-mindedness is the constant immersion in one's own thoughts. After all, a scientist lives not so much in real world how many thoughts there are in the world. And everything that distracts from them is wrong. It is known for certain that Yuri Vasilievich did not smoke cigarettes and never drank alcohol - not even beer. “It’s all nonsense…” he said. He did not recognize alcoholic beverages for the reason that "the head works worse" from them. Indeed, the head of a scientist should always be clear. But Yuri Vasilyevich loved sweets: as a child, he read somewhere that sugar improves brain function ... His jacket pockets were always stuffed with caramels.
As befits a true servant of science, Kondratyuk led an ascetic life, being content with only the bare necessities. When the harsh Siberian winter came into its own, Kondratyuk's constant companion was an old sheepskin coat without buttons with a high collar. “My universal rotunda,” the engineer called it. This sheepskin coat was indeed universal: at different times of the day, it performed the functions of either clothing, or a mattress or blanket. He surprised the inhabitants of Stone-on-Ob very much: one leg was shod in a boot, the other in a cut-off boot. In the summer, Kondratyuk usually walked in a canvas robe and outwardly did not differ from a simple worker, and in hot weather he could come to work in sandals on his bare feet.
Receiving a fairly large salary for those times, Yuri Vasilyevich practically did not spend money on himself - he basically sent the available cash to relatives and friends, who, as he believed, needed money much more than he did. Many borrowed from him, some did not give back ... However, Kondratyuk did not care much about this.
Colleagues loved him and considered him a good comrade, whom you can rely on in everything. He especially loved young people - he was always ready to help, explain, teach. But he didn’t know how to scold subordinates at all - even if they deserved it. Gorchakov often remarked to him that he dismissed his employees. Kondratyuk was confused by these remarks. He even specially rehearsed how he would scold the guilty in a strict voice, but, seeing a living person in front of him, he could not repeat the learned lesson.
Kondratyuk did not show much interest in women, but at the same time he was a gentleman to the marrow of his bones. Such a case is known. Once, in his presence, one of the men allowed himself to read an obscene rhyme. And although none of the women understood anything (the female gender did not understand Latin), Yuri Vasilyevich did not hesitate to approach the joker and, flashing his eyes, said:
- For what you dared to say now in the presence of women, they beat you in the face. Get out of here immediately!
They remembered this case precisely because everyone considered Kondratyuk meek and completely harmless. And here you are - “in the face” ... Perhaps, indeed, if a woman had been insulted in his presence, the insolent would have got the first number!
By the way, comrades and colleagues tried to “marry” Yuri Vasilyevich more than once. Kondratyuk, smiling, scooped sweets out of his pocket and treated the lady. This, in fact, it all ended ...
Meanwhile, work on the conquest of interstellar space continued, and there was still little time for it. But at the beginning of the summer of 1928, Gorchakov sent Kondratyuk to the remote, remote village of Ingash as a foreman. Actually, the meaning of this translation was that Kondratyuk was only listed there as a foreman, thanks to which he was able to devote all his time to scientific research. But there was another reason for the “disappearance”: at that time, the trial of the “Shakhty case” began in Moscow, and they began to look for “sabotage engineers” throughout the country.
And now the book is almost ready. In the autumn of the same year, Yuri Vasilyevich returned to Novosibirsk to finally publish it ... at his own expense: he no longer hoped for Moscow. I had to suffer with the printing house: the workers there, not understanding anything in the formulas, constantly blurted out a bunch of mistakes. Finally the miracle happened. The book "The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces" was published. This happened in 1929.
It was small - less than 100 pages - and its circulation was only 2,000 copies. Y. Kondratyuk. conquest of interplanetary spaces . Edited and with a foreword by Prof. V. P. Vetchinkina- appeared on the cover, which was decorated with a laconic drawing of the author - a black circle of the Earth, surrounded by an arrow - the trajectory of the rocket. On the title page could read: AUTHOR'S EDITION . Novosibirsk, st. Derzhavin, 7. It was at this address that Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk lived at the time when his book was published. This happened in 1929.
After so many years of hard work, the scientist was able to pick up the first copy of his book. I am glad to finally have the opportunity to present you my book, he writes to Vetchinkin. - Published it with great pain and devilishly expensive. The local compositors could not cope with the formulas, and I was constantly on the road.
He handed one copy, of course, to the Gorchakovs. Olga Nikolaevna asked:
- Do you really believe in the feasibility of your childhood dream?
Yuri Vasilievich replied:
“I believe, I believe, dear Olga Nikolaevna. Yes, you yourself believe, don't you?
The release of the book was celebrated with the Gorchakovs. Everyone drank wine, and Yuri Vasilyevich - tea. They sang a funny song about him:
I don't recognize women
I have loved Luna since childhood.
I dream of meeting her
Crew invent.
This event Kondratyuk considered the main thing in his life. He was sure that now he would be recognized, recognized as "their own", and his rocket was about to be created. Alas, he was wrong. No one rushed to him with open arms. Even colleagues and friends, who wholeheartedly congratulated Yuri Vasilyevich on this event, continued to consider him a dreamer and dreamer.
Kondratyuk hoped that he would soon be given all the opportunities for the practical implementation of his research, that is, for the creation of a rocket and the implementation of the first flight. But the only positive result was that he began a correspondence with prominent scientists of that time, in particular with Tsiolkovsky.
And now fate gives him another surprise. The most honest worker, who did so much for the good of his Motherland, was accused ... of sabotage. Well, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished. The local leadership came to the conclusion that Kondratyuk's Mastodon (a granary in Kamen-on-Ob), built without drawings and without a single nail, would not withstand and fall apart, burying several thousand tons of grain under a pile of logs. “Sabotage,” the officials unequivocally declared. Well, such was the fad then - the search for traitors, spies and wreckers, when millions of innocent people suffered.
They arrested not only Kondratyuk, but also Gorchakov and several other people from Khlebstroy. It was 1930. After a lengthy investigation, Kondratyuk is sentenced to 3 years in the camps. Such was the "gratitude" of the state for the invaluable contribution to the development of domestic science and technology. Fortunately (if this word is appropriate here at all), less than six months have passed since the sentence was replaced by deportation to work all in the same Khlebstroy.
But hopes for the realization of his dream have already collapsed. The infamous 58th article - "Anti-Soviet activity" - marked then with an indelible stigma for the rest of his life.
The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces was Kondratyuk's first and last book. It turned out to be impossible to put into practice what was said in it, at least- in foreseeable future. But he believed that a rocket could be built already in the 1920s. He believed that he would be the first to make a space flight ...
Finally, Gorchakov and Kondratyuk were rescued from captivity ... by a windmill. The fact is that in the early 30s a competition was announced for best project wind power plant (WPP) in the Crimea - the idea was submitted by Ordzhonikidze himself. At first, Kondratyuk was engaged in this project without much enthusiasm, but gradually got involved in the work. The idea fascinated him more and more. At the request of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry, in February 1933, Kondratyuk and Gorchakov were given permission to travel to Moscow. Then the permit was extended twice, and soon, apparently at the request of the same Ordzhonikidze, they were released ahead of schedule. The Kondratyuk wind farm project was recognized as the best. It would seem that great prospects began to open up again; the scientist now lives in the capital, he is offered a job in a newly created study group jet propulsion(GIRD), which is headed by Sergei Pavlovich Korolev himself - what else to dream of? But Kondratyuk refuses this offer. Why? Most likely, he was afraid of being exposed during the background checks necessary for a device in such a serious organization.
Professor Vetchinkin nominated Kondratyuk for degree the doctors technical sciences- The offer was rejected. Too many people in Moscow did not like this self-taught genius.
The project of the most powerful wind farm in the world suffered, alas, the same fate as the space flight project. The red tape that lasted for more than one year, endless examinations and evaluations of "prominent figures" ended with the fact that the WPP was recognized as unprofitable, moreover, when the foundation had already been built.
It is not difficult to guess what feelings overwhelmed Yuri Vasilyevich. But what could he do - self-taught with a White Guard past and a stigma of a pest? Perhaps the 30s - the years after the publication of his book, turned out to be the most bitter for Kondratyuk. And the most disturbing - at any moment he could be arrested: the repressions were in full swing.
The Great Patriotic War began. Yuri Vasilievich did not hesitate for a long time and on July 6, 1941, he volunteered for the front. His last letter from the front arrived in the winter of 1942.
Where and under what circumstances he died is still unknown. There were other versions of his disappearance. Some believed that Kondratyuk remained alive and, having changed his name for the second time, left Russia, but this is hardly true. However, we do not know the place or the exact time of Kondratyuk's death.
He disappeared, but how much useful, people need left behind! This is the elevator bucket - "Kondratyuk bucket", which is still in prewar years spread throughout the country, and the famous "Mastodon" - the world's largest wooden granary, built without a single nail, and the suspension bridge in Novokuznetsk, and the project of the most powerful wind farm ... Not to mention the achievements in the field of space flight research.
Kondratyuk has many valuable ideas; most of them sooner or later found a use in life. Perhaps the most famous of them is the idea of preliminarily launching a ship into the orbit of the Moon and using a small take-off and landing apparatus to land a person on its surface. It was according to this scheme that the flight to the Moon was carried out in 1969; "Kondratyuk track" - that's what it was called later.
There were a lot of developments by Yu. V. Kondratyuk - mainly, of course, in the field of rocket technology. This includes the use of oxygen-hydrogen fuel in rocket engines, and a turbopump unit for supplying fuel, and various mechanisms for controlling and orienting a rocket - in particular, the use of gravitation of celestial bodies for space maneuvers. Some of them, as it turned out, were carried out even before Kondratyuk - after all, he worked in almost complete isolation and for a long time did not have the opportunity to get acquainted with scientific works scientists time.
Long before space flight became realistic, Kondratyuk carefully worked out all its details. He invented suits for astronauts, special chairs for them, simulated spacewalks. Space bases for refueling ships in orbit around the Earth and other planets are also his idea, not to mention the multi-stage rocket.
Subsequently, all these ideas formed the basis modern astronautics, but this happened, unfortunately, after the death of the scientist - he was so ahead of his time.
Kondratyuk could have done much more if not for the cruel time. If not for the "wolfhound age". Lord, how monstrously unfairly treated him by his homeland!
Remembered Kondratyuk after the death of Stalin, in the era Khrushchev thaw. In 1970, he was officially rehabilitated, having been found not guilty of what he was accused of forty years ago - of sabotage. Ten years later, a film about Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk was released, it was called "Bread and the Moon". The truth about Kondratyuk came back to us bit by bit, step by step. His real name became known to many only recently.
The name of this person - though not the real one - nevertheless returned to us. Returned forever. One of the squares in Novosibirsk, the streets of Russian cities, minor planet № 3084, lunar crater. Research and memorial centers for Kondratyuk have been established in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Tatarstan, and Novosibirsk. Any Novosibirsk citizen is well acquainted with a small two-story house on Sovetskaya Street, 24, where the scientist once lived. It was here that he brought the first copies of his book. Here he fell asleep, sitting until late at night over the drawings. Now it is his museum.
Our scientist is remembered not only in Russia. Probably, few people know that they visited the house on Sovetskaya, 24 American astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. He came to our city on purpose to visit the places where Kondratyuk lived and worked. And so touching fact: Armstrong took with him to distant America a handful of earth from Sovetskaya Street. Such reverence for Kondratyuk is not accidental, because it was his scheme for flying to the moon that the American scientist John Houbolt. Exactly 40 years after the publication of "The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces" in Novosibirsk, NASA carried out the flight of American astronauts to the Moon on the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
Is there anything else to come? What planets will a person be able to reach? .. One can only guess about this. But while spaceships start from our sinful Earth, the name of Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk will not be forgotten.
Publisher:
Club of patrons
Place of publication.
The first manned flight into space was preceded by the hard work of the pioneers of astronautics - dreamers and theorists who propagated the need for space flights and theoretically substantiated their possibility. One of the pioneers of cosmonautics was Alexander Ignatievich Shargei, better known as Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, whose 115th birthday was on June 21. Almost all proposals substantiated by Yu.V. Kondratyuk in books that he published at his own expense in 1919 and 1927. have been put into practice.
In particular, it was his calculations that formed the basis for the development of the trajectory of a man's flight to the moon. Alexander Ignatievich Shargei was born on June 9 (June 21, according to the new style), 1897 in Poltava in the family of Lyudmila Lvovna Shlipenbach and Gnat (Ignatius) Benediktovich Shargei. Alexander's mother belonged to an old Swedish baronial family. It was her ancestor in the poem "Poltava" that Alexander Sergeevich recalled
Pushkin:
"Firing repulsed squads,
Interfering, they fall to dust.
Rosen leaves through the gorge,
Passionate Schlipenbach surrenders ... "
In 1910, at the age of 13, Alexander was left an orphan and was brought up in the family of his grandfather on his father's side, doctor Akim Nikitich Datsenok. In the same year, he became a student of the Second Poltava Men's Gymnasium, from which he graduated with a silver medal in 1916 and entered the mechanical department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. After studying for only two months, he was drafted into the army and enrolled in the ensign school. Then he got to the front and until March 1918 fought on the Caucasian front.
When after the October Revolution royal army broke up, Alexander Ignatievich went to his native Poltava. But at one of the Kuban stations he was detained by a White Guard patrol and, as an officer, he was mobilized into the White Army. unwilling to participate in fratricidal war, Shargei deserted at the first opportunity and reached Kyiv, which was in the hands of Denikin's troops. Here he was again mobilized into the White Army, but, having deserted again, he settled in the town of Smela, Cherkasy region.
After the civil war, life was difficult. Shargei often moved from place to place and took on any job that could support himself: he worked as a loader and oiler for railway, a mechanic at a mill and Shrovetide, a mechanic at a stoker at a sugar factory and an elevator ...
At any moment, Alexander Ignatievich, as a former White Guard officer, could be arrested. To get rid of the feeling constant fear in the face of an uncertain future, he took a desperate step.
In Kyiv, Alexander Ignatievich's stepmother, Elena Petrovna Kareeva (Goberman), lived with her daughter on Saksaganskogo Street. When their friend student Georgy (Yuri) Vasilyevich Kondratyuk died, his stepmother handed over his documents to Alexander Ignatievich. After much deliberation, O.G.Shargey entered the military register in Malaya Viska as Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, born in 1900, the son of a gymnasium teacher from Volyn.
For a long time Shargey Kondratyuk worked in the south of Ukraine, Kuban, North Caucasus. In particular, in 1925 he moved to the Krylovskaya station in the Krasnodar Territory and began working as a mechanic at a grain elevator, and two years later he received an invitation to Novosibirsk to work at Khleboprodukt, where he took part in the construction and improvement of elevators. It was then that he built his famous Mastodon elevator in Kamen on the Ob - a huge granary for 13,000 tons, a real technical miracle.
On July 30, 1930, he, along with several other Khleboprodukt employees, was arrested on charges of sabotage. One of the charges was that he built the "Mastodon" not only without drawings, but even without nails. The local authorities came to the conclusion that the structure would not withstand huge amount grains and fall apart.
On May 10, 1931, Kondratyuk was sentenced to three years in the camps (although the Mastodon stood for more than sixty years and burned down in the mid-1990s). Instead of camps, Yuri Vasilievich was recruited to work in the Novosibirsk Specialized Bureau No. 14 for prisoners of engineers for the design of coal enterprises. While working at Bureau No. 14, Yu.V. Kondratyuk accidentally got acquainted with the conditions of the competition announced by the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry for the design of a powerful Crimean wind farm (WPP). Yuri Vasilyevich made sketches, made calculations and sent them to specialists. Thanks to his innovative proposals and with the assistance of the initiator of these works People's Commissar(according to the modern - the minister) of heavy industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze Kondratyuk is involved in the implementation unusual project. In May 1933, he entered the branch of the Institute of Industrial Energy in Kharkov, at that time the capital of Ukraine.
The project of the station was carried out in collaboration with P.K. Gorchakov, and later the engineer M.V. Nikitin, the future creator of the building of Moscow State University and the Ostankino TV tower in Moscow and other outstanding structures, was involved in the project. In 1937, on Mount AiPetri in the Crimea, the construction of the foundation of the station began, but already in 1938 it was decided to stop the design and construction of powerful wind farms, among which was the project of a wind farm with a capacity of 12 MW, with a tower 160 m high and a three-bladed propeller with a diameter of 80 m. In this regard, in the next two years, Kondratyuk had to design small research wind farms in the Design and Experimental Office of Wind Power Plants.
During one of his visits to Moscow, Kondratyuk met with S.P. Korolev and received an invitation from him to work, but refused. Work on military projects provided for strict control by the "authorities", and Yuri Vasilyevich feared that a thorough check of his biography could reveal the fact of forgery of documents and the White Guard past ...
June 21, 1941 Yu. V. Kondratyuk turned 44 years old, and a few days later he volunteered for the front. He was enlisted as an ordinary telephone operator in the communications company of the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the 21st Moscow Division of the People's Militia of the Kiev District of the 33rd Army of the Reserve Front. Subsequently, he became a squad leader, and then an assistant commander of a communications platoon. On February 23, 1942, Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk died in battle with the Nazi invaders in the vicinity of the village of Krivtsovo, Bolkhovsky district, Oryol region ...
The idea of flying to the Moon and the planets of the solar system captured Alexander Shargei while still studying at the gymnasium. He started a notebook in which he began to write down his first calculations and thoughts regarding flights to the expanses of the Universe.
In his first book, To Those Who Will Read to Build, published in 1919, he wrote: that, from a theoretical point of view, flying a rocket into world space is nothing incredible."
In this work, he derived the basic equation of rocket motion, provided a diagram and description of a four-stage oxygen-hydrogen rocket, a rocket engine combustion chamber with various combinations of oxidizer and fuel injectors, a paraboloid nozzle, and much more. Here it was also proposed to use atmospheric resistance to slow down the rocket during its descent in order to save fuel, during flights to other planets to put the ship into orbit of an artificial satellite, and to land a person on them and return to the ship, use a compact take-off and landing module (this is was implemented by the American agency NASA in the "Apollo" program), to use the gravitational field of celestial bodies for additional acceleration or deceleration of a spacecraft for flights in the solar system ("perturbation maneuver"), the possibility of using solar energy to power the onboard systems of spacecraft and placing on Earth orbit large mirrors to illuminate the Earth's surface.
Only in the 1920s did he come across an old issue of the journal "Bulletin of Aeronautics" with an article by K.E. Tsiolkovsky about space flights. How sorry Yuri Vasilyevich was that it happened so late! “At the same time,” wrote Kondratyuk, “I saw with pleasure that I not only repeated the previous study, albeit with different methods, but also made new important contributions to the theory of flight.”
Subsequently, Kondratyuk prepared for publication another book called "The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces." "Headscience" long time The publication of this book dragged on with the issue until Kondratyuk printed it in 1929 at his own expense in Novosibirsk. It has only 73 pages, 6 sheets of diagrams and drawings, but it was this thin brochure that brought world fame to the author.
This book proposes a sequence of the first stages of space exploration and develops some of the ideas formulated in the first book.
Yuri Kondratyuk proposed the optimal path for the rocket after its launch (the so-called "curve flight"), namely: vertical ascent through the dense layers of the atmosphere, and then into orbit with a certain trajectory. He considered the issue of thermal protection of spacecraft during their movement in the atmosphere. But his main proposal was intermediate interplanetary bases with supplies of everything necessary for a long flight. He emphasized the need to create a permanent space base in orbit around the Moon, to which cargo would be delivered by automatic cargo rockets, and interplanetary ships could replenish their supplies and continue on their way to Mars, Venus or Mercury.
Kondratyuk also wrote about the possibility of launching a ship on wings and developed a "space shuttle" scheme. He suggested that during the first flight to the Moon, the crew of the spacecraft would consist of three people, two of whom, with the help of a special module, would get to the lunar surface, and the third would remain in the ship in lunar orbit (which happened exactly this way almost forty years later).
Now Yu.V.Kondratyuk's memory is respected all over the world. A crater on the far side of the Moon and a minor planet in the solar system are named after him, as well as the route along which the rocket with a man first reached the Moon. In Kyiv, a street is named after him, a monument was opened in Poltava, and his name was given to the Poltava National technical university. There is a medal named after Yu.V. Kondratyuk, released commemorative coin and two postage stamps. AT Russian Federation a street in Moscow and a square in Novosibirsk are named after him, in the village of Oktyabrskaya, the Krylovsky district of the Krasnodar Territory, the "Memorial Museum of Y. Kondratyuk" was opened. Americans who consider Kondratyuk the ancestor space age, at Cape Canaveral erected a monument to him. And on the day of his anniversary - June 21, 2012 - main page popular search engine on the Internet Google was dedicated to Yu.V.Kondratyuk.
