Friedrich Zander

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Friedrich Zander, postage stamp of the Soviet Union, 1964
Friedrich Zander, postage stamp of the Soviet Union, 1964

Friedrich Zander (23 August 1887 – 28 March 1933), often transliterated Fridrikh Arturovich Tsander from "Фридрих Артурович Цандер", the Russian version of his name, or Frīdrihs Canders in the Latvian version, was a Baltic German pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight in the Soviet Union. He designed the first liquid-fuelled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space.

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[edit] Life

Zander was born in Riga, Livonia, into a Baltic German family. His father, a doctor, was named Artur, thus Arturovich was listed as his middle name in Russian. Livland had been an autonomous province of the Russian Empire shortly before, but at that time subject to a stiff Russification policy.

Friedrich was trained as an engineer and got to know the ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Papers of Tsiolkovsky's rocket visions went through a publishing board, which Zander had been a member of. In particular, he became passionate about the exploration of Mars, adopting "towards Mars!" as a personal slogan, and made precise calculations of the trajectory required to get there. In 1908, he published his first work considering 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 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.

1924 was a particularly active year for Zander. The year before, German Hermann Oberth had published his ground-breaking book "Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen" ("The rocket to the planet spaces", or a bit loose: "By Rocket into Planetary Space"), which triggered wide-scaled publicity and scientific research on the topic of space flight and can be regarded as the initial starting point of the space age. Zander took advantage of this by promoting Tsiolkovsky's work, and developing it further. Together with Yuri Kondratyuk and his retired mentor Tsiolokovsky, 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 lodged a patent in Moscow for a winged rocket that he believed would be suitable for interplanetary flight, and in October gave a lecture to the Moscow Institute on the possibility of reaching Mars by rocket. During questioning after the lecture, he summarised the importance of reaching this planet in particular: "because it has an atmosphere and the capacity to support life. Mars is also known as 'the red star' and this is the emblem of our grand Soviet army."

Around this time, Zander became the first to suggest the solar sail as a means of spacecraft propulsion, although Johannes Kepler had suggested a solar wind sail in the Seventeenth Century.

In 1930 the Soviet regime assigned two groups with the making and testing of rocket propulsion with liquid-fuel, one led by Zander and the other by Glushko.

In 1931, Zander was a founding member of GIRD (Group for the Investigation of Reaction Propulsion) (Группа изучения реактивного движения (ГИРД)) in Moscow. The group set about attempting to construct liquid-fuelled rockets, and it was its tenth attempt (the GIRD-X) that finally flew successfully on 25 November 1933. Zander had designed the rocket, but did not live to see it fly, having died of Typhus in March of that year in the city of Kislovodsk.

[edit] Tributes

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

  • Цандер, Фридрих Артурович (1967). Из научного наследия (in Russian). Moscow: Nauka. 
    • Technical translation by NASA: Tsander, Fridrikh Arturovich (1969). From a scientific heritage. Washington D.C.: NASA. 
  • Tsander, Fridrikh Arturovich (1977). Selected Papers (in Russian). Riga: Zinātne. 
  • Golovanov, Yaroslav (1985). The Martian:Tsander (in Russian). Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya. 

[edit] External Links