Graduation address: Monday 27 June afternoon ceremony (3pm)

Graduation address by Professor Graham Turnbull, School of Physics and Astronomy

Vice-Chancellor, honoured guests, colleagues, it is my great honour to address our new graduates this afternoon.  

Congratulations to you all! We applaud your success and the exceptional results of your hard work. Today is your day of celebration, though we know that others have made this journey with you and willed you along. Your families and your friends are rightly proud of you; and we are all delighted to celebrate your success.

Normally, graduation marks the end of one important phase in your life and the beginning of a new adventure. Not so for the class of 2021! 

You have already launched a thousand new adventures. Graduation for you marks a brief re-encounter with your alma mater; a short fly-past on a journey that you launched a year ago, like a spacecraft swinging past a familiar planet to propel it onwards to new worlds.

This gravitational slingshot is a remarkable process in which two bodies interact while they are physically distanced (and through the pandemic we have all learned how to do that…). The moving planet transfers a small part of its momentum to you, the spacecraft. It can send you in a new direction; it can increase your speed by twice the speed of the planet.

The slingshot was a visionary concept for space travel from a brilliant young Ukrainian engineer named Yuri Kondratyuk.

Yuri was born in 1897 in Poltava, a city 100 km west of Kharkiv. He was born with another name – Oleksandr Ignatyevich Shargei – but he lived through turbulent times that would change his name, life, and career. A target of the Bolshevik army for being on the wrong side of the Revolution, the young Oleksandr tried to flee to Poland. But when this failed, he was forced instead to take the name and identity of another man – Yuri Kondratyuk, who had recently died of TB – and then fled east to start a new life.

Throughout his life, Yuri was fascinated by the distant possibility of space travel. He conceived remarkable engineering solutions that might one day make it possible. 100 years ago, when planes were still largely made of cloth and wood, he conceived how to land a human being on the Moon (and bring them back). A multistage rocket could propel a smaller vehicle into the Moon’s orbit, from which an even smaller spacecraft would hop down to the surface and back. His incredible foresight and calculations in the 1920s eventually became the technical solutions of the space age that would take astronauts to the Moon and back, and spacecraft to the far reaches of the Solar System. 

Kondratyuk also applied his engineering skills to more earthly matters, designing a massive grain elevator in Siberia made of wood but no nails, and a huge wind turbine for Crimea on a scale that was 80 years ahead of its time. Tragically, Yuri saw none of his grandest projects completed. Politics, suspicion, and even the Gulag intervened. Yuri died in action in the Second World War and so did not witness the space race that verified and implemented his visionary calculations.

So, what advice can I draw from the life of this brilliant Ukrainian engineer? Now I cannot recommend that you begin your career with a name change and identity theft! However, you must be determined in the face of adversity. The world – as we can all plainly see – often moves in a direction that neither makes sense nor will slingshot you forward. 

The most important advice, though, is you must reach for the Moon! Dream big! But do not just dream – do the maths and work out how you might bring your dreams to reality. 

Your St Andrews degree is an educational slingshot that will propel you forwards on your life journey. I wish you a successful journey, and hope that many of you will choose a trajectory that brings you back again to St Andrews at some point in the future.