He designed the first liquid-fueled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union, GIRD-X, and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space.

Zander was enrolled in the Riga urban technical high school in 1898, for a seven-year program in which he was a top student.

[4][5][6] In 1908, he made notes about the problems of interplanetary travel in which he addressed issues such as life support and became the first to suggest growing plants in greenhouses aboard a spacecraft.

In 1911, he published plans for a spacecraft built using combustible alloys of aluminum in its structure that would take off like a conventional aircraft and then burn its wings for fuel as it reached the upper atmosphere and no longer needed them.

The year before, Hermann Oberth had published the influential theoretical work "Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen" ("The rocket to interplanetary space"), which in turn introduced Zander and other Russian enthusiasts to the ground breaking work by Robert Goddard ("A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" published in 1919).

Together with Vladimir Vetchinkin and members of a rocketry club at the airforce academy, he founded the Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel.

[8] Zander showed his deep understanding of the physics behind the concept and he foresaw the advantage it could play for interplanetary travels, with a vision far ahead of his contemporaries.

In 1931, Zander was a founding member of GIRD (Group for the Study of Reactive Motion) (Группа изучения реактивного движения (ГИРД)) in Moscow.