Valentin Glushko

Valentin Petrovich Glushko (born September 2, 1908 in Odessa, Ukraine, died January 10, 1989) was a Russian engineer and rocketry pioneer.

At the age of 13 he became interested in aeronautics after reading novels by Jules Verne. He attended university in Leningrad where he studied physics and mathematics. After graduation he worked at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in Leningrad. During the 1930s he began studying liquid-fueled rocket engines.

On March 23, 1938 he became caught up in Stalin's Great Terror and was rounded up by the NKVD, to be placed in the Butyrka prison. By August 15, 1939 he was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. Despite his supposed imprisonment, however, Glushko was put to work on various aircraft projects with other arrested scientists. In 1941 he was placed in charge of a design bureau for liquid-fueled rocket engines. He was finally released in 1944 by special decree.

At the end of World War II, Glushko was sent to Germany and Eastern Europe to study the German rocket program. From 1946 until 1974 he was head of OKB-456, an independent design bureau that was a prominent developer of rocket engines within the Soviet Union. Among his designs was the powerful RD-170 liquid propellant engine.

In 1974, Glushko was selected to lead NPO Energia, a primary Russian developer of manned spacecraft. He had long criticised the N1-L3 rocket, and one of his first steps was to request the cancellation of that program. He was an advocate of a new line of powerful launchers that he wanted to use for the establishment of a Russian lunar base. However the American Apollo program was coming to an end at about that time, and the government wanted to build a competitor to the Space Shuttle.

It was only following his death that Glushko's efforts became known to most of the Russian populace.

Honors

• An asteroid number 6357 , which was found in 1976 was named in his honour by Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh.
• There is a Glushko crater on the Earth's moon named after him.

External links

• Glushko — detailed biography at Encyclopedia Astronautica