The spacecraft for the historic Artemis II mission successfully completed a flyby of the Moon, revealing its far side, which had been hidden from our view.
The crew officially set an absolute record: never before in history has any human traveled so far from their home planet.
Ukrainian genius who predicted path to Moon decades before space age
In 1929, in his book The Conquest of Interplanetary Space, he was the first to formulate the theory of multistage rockets and calculate the optimal trajectory, known as the “Kondratiuk Loop”, a flight from Earth orbit to lunar orbit and back using gravitational maneuvers.
Kondratiuk’s ideas became foundation of modern spaceflight
He proposed the concept of a rendezvous in lunar orbit, in which the main spacecraft remains in orbit while a smaller module lands on the surface and then returns, according to the Ukraine's Money Museum.
This exact scheme was later used in the Apollo program.
Genius who did not live to see his triumph
Yury Kondratiuk was decades ahead of his time. He studied solar energy, intermediate space bases, and the gravitational fields of celestial bodies.
Tragically, he died in 1942 during World War II and did not live to witness the historic landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on 20 July 1969, as part of the Apollo 11 mission.
In his honor, a crater on the far side of the Moon and the asteroid 3084 Kondratiuk were named after him.
