“We found a small inconspicuous booklet published in Russia right after the revolution. Its author, Yuri Kondratyuk, substantiated and calculated the energy efficiency of landing on the moon according to the following scheme: flight to the orbit of the Moon – start to the Moon from orbit – return to orbit and docking with the main ship – flight to Earth.” This recognition of American scientists is sensational: the US lunar program based on the works of the remarkable scientist Yuri Kondratyuk. In fact, his name was Alexander Ignatievich Shargei. A native of Poltava entered the Petrograd Polytechnic institute, but was immediately drawn to the color – the First World War was going on. After October 1917, the tsar’s officer was mobilized to the White army, but he deserted. He was threatened by a firing squad, but Shargei escaped execution – he managed to get documents on the name of Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk. In 1927, Kondratyuk was invited to Novosibirsk to work in the Khleboprodukt company. But creative engineering solutions led him straight to the GULAG. A valuable asset was sent to a special design office for prisoners-engineers – to design coal mines. Then there will be a wind power plant in Crimea, which Kondratyuk will design together with N. Nikitin, the future builder of the Ostankino TV tower. It won’t be built, although the project is recognized as magnificent. Yuri Vasilyevich did not have time for anything else – the platoon assistant commander Kondratyuk died in 1942 year near Kaluga. And what about space? And space was at the beginning, after the escape from the White army. Under the long and unassuming title To Those Who Would Read When Building, marked in 1919, Yuri Kondratyuk, independently of Tsiolkovsky, derived the basic equation of a rocket motion, described a 4-stage rocket on oxygen-hydrogen engine and developed the very scheme of flight, which was victoriously used by NASA in its lunar program. The second book, Conquest of Interplanetary Space, is dated 1929. And this book turned out to be useful for his descendants: a way of supplying satellites in orbit, proposed by Kondratyuk, was implemented in the form of the Progress transport system. After the flight to the moon, American astronaut Neil Armstrong specially came to Novosibirsk. And he took up land near the house where Yuri Kondratyuk lived. “This soil is of no less value to me than lunar soil,” then said the man who first flew to the Moon “on the Kondratyuk route.”