Yuri Kondratyuk's 115th BirthdayOver 50 years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, Ukranian engineer and mathematician Aleksandr Shargei - later to be known as
Yuri Kondratyuk - worked out the most efficient way of sending a spacecraft to the Moon and bringing it back again. It wasn't widely known, but NASA aerospace engineer John C. Houbolt knew it and against some virulent opposition, persuaded NASA. It's known as the LOR (lunar orbit rendezvous), or "Kondratyuk's route".