Friedrich Zander

Friedrich Zander was a Baltic German engineer and rocketry theorist, born in Riga in the Russian Empire, who became one of the founding figures of Soviet rocketry and spaceflight theory in the years following the Russian Revolution. Independently influenced by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's writings, he developed his own theoretical work on interplanetary flight, spacecraft propulsion and the use of solar sails and metal fuel additives to improve rocket engine efficiency, and in 1930 helped found GIRD, the Moscow-based amateur rocketry collective that became the seedbed of the later Soviet state rocket program and counted a young Sergei Korolev among its members. In 1932 he successfully tested an early Soviet liquid-fuel rocket engine, and he died in 1933 while working on a hybrid rocket design intended to be the Soviet Union's first liquid-fuel rocket to fly. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor, as is a Riga rocketry museum.