Friedrich Zander
Georg Arthur Constantin Friedrich Zander (also Tsander, , tr. ; , – 28 March 1933), was a Baltic German pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He designed the first liquid-fueled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union, GIRD-X, and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space. Biography Zander was born in Riga, Russian Empire, into a Baltic German commoner family. His father Arthur Georg Zander was a doctor, but Friedrich Zander was fascinated by other natural sciences. Zander was enrolled in the Riga urban technical high school in 1898, for a seven-year program in which he was a top student. During this time, he became acquainted with the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and space travel became his foremost scientific passion. While studying engineering at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, he carried out trajectory calculations for a flight to Mars. Mars held a special fascination for Zander, and "Forward to Mars!" (Вперед, на Марс!) became his famous motto. He graduated with his engineering degree in 1914, moved to Moscow in 1915. He worked at the "Provodnik" rubber plant, then in 1919 worked at Aircraft Factory No. 4 ("Motor"). In 1923, he was married to A.F. Milyukova, and they had a daughter named Astra and a son named Mercury. Mercury died of scarlet fever in 1929. After several years of unemployment and intensive research on rocketry and space travel, in 1926, Zander began work at the Central Design Bureau of Aviation, and in 1930 worked at the Central Institute of Aviation Motor Construction (TsIAM). Scientific contributions In 1908, he made notes about the problems of interplanetary travel in which he addressed issues such as life support and became the first to suggest growing plants in greenhouses aboard a spacecraft. In 1911, he published plans for a spacecraft built using combustible alloys of aluminum in its structure that would take off like a conventional aircraft and then burn its wings for fuel as it reached the upper atmosphere and no longer needed them. In 1921, he presented his material to the Association of Inventors (AIIZ), where he met and discussed space travel with V.I. Lenin, who was attending the conference. In 1924, he published it in the journal of Technology and Life (Tekhnika i Zhizn). 1924 was a particularly active year for Zander. The year before, Hermann Oberth had published the influential theoretical work "Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen" ("The rocket to interplanetary space"), which in turn introduced Zander and other Russian enthusiasts to the ground breaking work by Robert Goddard ("A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" published in 1919). Zander took advantage of this by promoting Tsiolkovsky's work, and developing it further. Together with Vladimir Vetchinkin and members of a rocketry club at the airforce academy, he founded the Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel. In an early publication, they would be the first to suggest using the Earth's atmosphere as a way of braking a re-entering spacecraft. The same year, Zander