Lunar orbit rendezvous (Kondratyuk)
Encuentro en órbita lunar (Kondratiuk)
- Date
- 1916-1929 · confidence medium
- Place
- Novosibirsk, Russia
- Credited to
- Yuri Kondratyuk (Aleksandr Shargei)
- Field
- Movement
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Concept of going to the Moon with a small craft that separates in lunar orbit to descend and then return to a mother ship. Kondratyuk set it out in 'The Conquest of Interplanetary Space' (1929).
The idea is credited to Kondratyuk, but John Houbolt proposed it independently to NASA in 1961. Whether Apollo engineers knew Kondratyuk's text is disputed; its later dissemination is more a historiographic claim than a demonstrated influence.
What it led to
- mass savings compared with a direct descent of the whole ship
- NASA's adoption of lunar orbit rendezvous in 1962 for the Apollo programme
- design of the lunar module and command module