Portal:Space exploration/Biography/Week 15 2007

Fridrikh Arturovich Tsander (no picture available) (August 23, 1887 – March 28, 1933), (transliterated from the Russian version of his name: Фридрих Артурович Цандер) or Frīdrihs Canders (the Latvian version of it, or sometimes the German spelling Friedrich Zander) was a Soviet pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight. 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.

1924 was a particularly active year for Tsander. Together with Yuri Kondratyuk and his mentor Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 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, Tsander 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.

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