Nikolai Rynin

Nikolai Rynin was a Russian civil engineer and professor in Leningrad who became one of the earliest serious historians and theorists of spaceflight, developing an interest in aviation and human flight in 1906 after beginning his career in railway and civil engineering. His major achievement was Interplanetary Communications, a nine-volume encyclopedia published between 1928 and 1932 that surveyed the entire field as it then existed, from early fictional and speculative accounts of space travel through the technical theory of rocket propulsion and astronavigation, establishing Rynin as one of the first scholars to treat spaceflight as a coherent subject of serious study rather than fiction or isolated engineering proposals. He also carried out important historical recovery work, locating Nikolai Kibalchich's 1881 rocket-propelled flying machine design in police archives and publishing it in a magazine article in April 1918, decades after it had been suppressed by Tsarist authorities, and he corresponded internationally with other spaceflight pioneers, including American rocket engineer Robert Goddard, from as early as 1926. Rynin died during the Siege of Leningrad in 1942, of starvation and illness brought on by the blockade; a crater on the Moon is named in his honor.