Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk (name at birth — Alexander Ignatievich Shargey) was one of the founders of cosmonautics. He was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Poltava into the family of a Swedish baroness and a Jewish father converted to Catholicism.
The marriage of his parents broke up before long: his father went to study abroad, and his mother ended up in a psychiatric hospital — the boy lived in his grandmother’s house in his native city of Poltava. There he finished gymnasium with a silver medal and then entered the mechanical department of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.
However, he did not study long: just a couple of months later Shargey was drafted into the army and sent to the school of warrant officers. Having received the necessary training and brand-new shoulder straps, Shargey left for the Turkish front, where he served until the spring of 1918. Not wanting to participate in the Russian Civil War, Alexander did not join the White Movement and tried to escape from Kiev. The attempt failed; he was detained and returned back. Fearing punishment for his officer’s past, Shargey got fake documents in the name of Yuri Kondratyuk, born in 1900, under which he lived the rest of his life.
While serving in the army and at civilian enterprises, Alexander/Yuri studied the theory of space flights. In his works of 1919–1929, he, independently of Tsiolkovsky, derived the basic equation of rocket motion and drew up a scheme for the operation of a four-stage rocket on oxygen-hydrogen fuel. His ideas of a century ago, including those about using atmospheric drag for braking and gravity for acceleration, were clearly ahead of their time. Some of them were later implemented in the West, for example, by NASA in the Apollo program.
In the late 1930s, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev invited Kondratyuk to cooperate, but Yuri Vasilyevich refused — by that time he was already engaged in the construction of wind farms in the Crimea and had stopped active work on rocket and space subjects. However, his achievements interested colleagues and were further elaborated on. A few decades after the publication of the main works of the science enthusiast, all that eventually led to the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, manned spacecraft, and so on. Without being directly involved in assembling or launching rockets, Kondratyuk made a significant contribution to the general theoretical fundamentals.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Yuri Kondratyuk joined the people’s militia as a volunteer. After that, nothing was heard from him.
The marriage of his parents broke up before long: his father went to study abroad, and his mother ended up in a psychiatric hospital — the boy lived in his grandmother’s house in his native city of Poltava. There he finished gymnasium with a silver medal and then entered the mechanical department of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.
However, he did not study long: just a couple of months later Shargey was drafted into the army and sent to the school of warrant officers. Having received the necessary training and brand-new shoulder straps, Shargey left for the Turkish front, where he served until the spring of 1918. Not wanting to participate in the Russian Civil War, Alexander did not join the White Movement and tried to escape from Kiev. The attempt failed; he was detained and returned back. Fearing punishment for his officer’s past, Shargey got fake documents in the name of Yuri Kondratyuk, born in 1900, under which he lived the rest of his life.
While serving in the army and at civilian enterprises, Alexander/Yuri studied the theory of space flights. In his works of 1919–1929, he, independently of Tsiolkovsky, derived the basic equation of rocket motion and drew up a scheme for the operation of a four-stage rocket on oxygen-hydrogen fuel. His ideas of a century ago, including those about using atmospheric drag for braking and gravity for acceleration, were clearly ahead of their time. Some of them were later implemented in the West, for example, by NASA in the Apollo program.
In the late 1930s, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev invited Kondratyuk to cooperate, but Yuri Vasilyevich refused — by that time he was already engaged in the construction of wind farms in the Crimea and had stopped active work on rocket and space subjects. However, his achievements interested colleagues and were further elaborated on. A few decades after the publication of the main works of the science enthusiast, all that eventually led to the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, manned spacecraft, and so on. Without being directly involved in assembling or launching rockets, Kondratyuk made a significant contribution to the general theoretical fundamentals.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Yuri Kondratyuk joined the people’s militia as a volunteer. After that, nothing was heard from him.
