Friedrich Zander recovered from typhus

Friedrich Zander was Baltic German pioneer of rocketry in Soviet Union - he designed first liquid-fueled rocket in Soviet Union. What if he would ate much better than OTL and had a better health and don't die in 1933?
 
He lives long enough to get the blame for GIRD's experimental failures, Korolev and Glushko don't become enemies, Alexei Leonov becomes the first man on the moon in December 1967?
 
I rather thought that he could work with Korolev on N-1 project [Soviet Lunar Program]. Together they could conviced Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 [Soviet Lunar Program included in Seventh Plan] to start a N1 rocket project. I think that Leonow could land on the Moon by 1968/69 beating Americans.
 
There's only so much one human head can hold; the rocket men who started out in the twenties and early thirties were the project leaders of the late thirties and forties, the experimenters of the thirties and forties were the project leaders of the actual space age; Tsander (most of the references I have to him spell it in the Russian style) was an ideas man, and a great one, but how at home he would have been in the nuts and bolts of practical rocketry, not many from his generation made the leap. (Von Braun was largely a propagandist in the American years, IMO.)

The big problem, the watershed, is that GIRD got the bulk of their funding from the military, under Tukachevsky's patronage, which made them collateral damage in Stalin's purges. Glushko denounced Korolev to save his own skin, after some of the early experiments did not go well.

That period of national paranoia is the problem, the Soviet space program was maimed in the womb by it, and Tsander's role, had he been alive at the time? As someone with personal ties to Lenin, he would quite likely have been an additional target. Being a Baltic German wouldn't help. The odds are that he would not have survived the Yezhovschina.

The best thing he could probably do for the Soviet space program, given how likely he is to be a victim of politics, probably would be to protect the rest of the group- not least from each other- by taking the blame. The idea of him being active into the fifties and sixties, you'd need a Stalin whose value system did not revolve entirely around politics for that.
 
So, you are saying that ATL he will die in gulag. I suggest to determine his year of imprisonment and eventually die. Why? Because even if he will die, he will have a chance to continue his works and design rockets or even estabilish theories about solar sail. My conclusion is clear - his works ATL will have influence on future Soviet Space Program. For example - he could
accelerated some of the interwar period project and improve it. After war some components or rockets might be working better than OTL. Maybe fasten ballistic missile development? Or plans for pressurized capsule?
 
Unfortunately, sometimes the ugly possibilities are the realistic ones. You don't get much uglier than Stalin's gulags, but the rocket group was a victim of the purges. This is not an age of perfection, things are going to go wrong.

If you can come up with a good way to keep him alive, great, but look at Korolev- his time in Kolyma almost killed him, cost years of his productive life and left him with long term problems that contributed to his death.

If he gets sent to a sharashka without the trip to the arctic circle, I forget the Russian acronym- something like labour camp for scientific research- he might make it out at the end, and go on to do useful research. He is a theoretician primary, though; more useful when the space program has actually begun.

I mean, I'd read the timeline, but these are hurdles to be overcome on the way.
 
But if we placed PoD as less sparing Zander, he will eat better and if he will be placed in sharashka [he was designer of the first liquid-fueled rocket in Soviet Union] he will has greater chance for survival than Korolev in Kolyma.

So, I flip a coin on random.org

heads or tails

tails - gulag and death [let's say - northern Russia]
heads - sharashka and survival

obverse.jpg


So, he will survive in sharashka!
 
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