Apollo-11 trajectory to the Moon is named “Kondratyuk Route” after a self-educated Ukrainian who had calculated it 50 years before the lunar flight – International Space Hall of Fame
Kondratyuk was born as Aleksandr Ignatyevich Shargei on June 21, 1897 in the city of Poltava, in what is now the Ukraine. He attended the Great Polytechnic School in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia but was drafted into the army at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During the war, he began to write down his ideas of interplanetary flight. One of these was to use a modular spacecraft to reach the Moon: One part of the vehicle would stay in lunar orbit while the other, smaller portion of the craft would lander landed on the Moon’s surface. The lander would then return to rendezvous with the orbiter. He also calculated the trajectory to take a spacecraft from Earth to the Koon and back. This is now known as “Kondratyuk’s route” or “Kondratyuk’s loop”
