Chief Designer behind Luna 9 and Lunokhod, the man whose robots reached the Moon and Venus first
On 3 February 1966, as Luna 9 made humanity's first soft landing on the Moon, Babakin shouted: "Did you see how we landed it?! Like laying it in a cradle!"
Chief Designer of the Lavochkin Design Bureau (1965–1971). Taking over the troubled unmanned lunar and planetary probe program from Korolev, he achieved the world's first soft Moon landing (Luna 9), first lunar rover (Lunokhod-1), first robotic sample return (Luna 16), and first Venus landing (Venera 7): a streak that defined the peak of Soviet automated space exploration. A radio technician who earned his degree only at 43, he succeeded through rigorous ground testing where Korolev's approach had failed. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1971 at 56. Craters on the Moon and Mars bear his name.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1930Radio technician, Moscow city telephone network
- 1937Researcher, All-Union Electrotechnical Institute for Communications
- 1943Radar targeting lab chief, later chief engineer, Institute of Automation (VSNITO)
- 1949Surface-to-air missile and guidance systems, Chertok's division, NII-88
- 1952Burya cruise missile and V-300 anti-aircraft missile, OKB-301 (Lavochkin)
- 1965Chief Designer, OKB-301 / NPO Lavochkin — takes over all unmanned lunar and planetary probes
- 1966Luna 9 (first soft Moon landing), Luna 10 (first lunar orbiter)
- 1970Luna 16 (robotic sample return), Lunokhod-1 (lunar rover), Venera 7 (Venus landing)
- 1971Mars 2 and 3 launched — died of heart attack on 3 August
Related historical events
The engineering of reliability: rebuilding the unmanned program taken from Korolev
Babakin's historical importance rests less on any individual probe than on the working method that made them succeed. In 1965 the Soviet unmanned lunar and planetary program was transferred from OKB-1 (Korolev) to OKB-301 (Lavochkin). In the six years since Luna 3 not a single Soviet planetary probe had succeeded, and after yet another string of failures the leadership took the field away from Korolev and handed it to the newly independent Lavochkin bureau. Rather than patch the inherited designs, Babakin introduced what Korolev had never done systematically: proper bench testing of components and dynamics testing, shaking, heating, vibrating and vacuum-testing hardware on the ground before any launch was cleared. That regime bore its first fruit in the soft landing of Luna 9 (1966) and the Venus atmospheric entry of Venera 4 (1967). He was a chief designer who would pick up a soldering iron at the launch site and personally re-solder a faulty connector hours before liftoff, and who at flight reviews would sit with an absent gaze and then suddenly produce the outlandish idea that resolved a problem the team had searched for in vain. After his sudden death in 1971 the working culture he built remained in the bureau, carrying it through Lunokhod 2, the Venus landings and robotic sample return; NPO Lavochkin's test centre bears his name today.