The man who said 'go' for Tereshkova, Leonov, and Lunokhod
Minutes before Vostok 5, the third-stage 'Go' light stays dark. The commission leans toward scrubbing. Tyulin backs Korolev: it's instrumentation. They recycle the count — and the launch is perfect.
Soviet rocket-space scientist and Lieutenant General who served as First Deputy Chairman of GKOT (1963–1965) and First Deputy Minister of General Machine Building (1965–1976). As chairman of State Commissions, he personally gave the final launch command for Tereshkova's Vostok 6, Leonov's first spacewalk on Voskhod 2, the first soft lunar landing (Luna 9), and Lunokhod (Luna 17). He bore final governmental responsibility for the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (1974–1975) as the deputy minister directly in charge. A mathematician who began as a lathe operator at fourteen and served in Katyusha rocket units during the war, Tyulin was among the small cadre of military-technical managers who turned the Soviet rocket program from experimental launches into an institutionalized state capability.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1941–1944Katyusha rocket units: battery commander to chief of staff, 3rd Army Operational Group GMCh
- 1945–1946Led V-2 rocket technology recovery group in Germany ('Tyulin's Enterprise')
- 1948–1955NII-4: head of ballistics lab → deputy chief for science → first deputy chief
- 1959–1961Director, NII-88 (later TsNIIMash)
- 1961–1965Deputy Chairman → First Deputy Chairman, GKOT
- 1965–1976First Deputy Minister of General Machine Building (under Minister S. A. Afanasyev)
- 1974–1975Chairman, Soviet Coordination Committee for Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
- 1977–1990Organized and led Wave Processes Research Lab, MSU Mech-Math Faculty
Related historical events
From combat officer to rocket-recovery organizer (1944–1947)
Recalled from the front in late 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Tyulin was appointed senior assistant to the technical department of the main directorate of Guards mortar (Katyusha) units, which was soon reorganized as the 5th department of the main artillery directorate. In May 1945 he was sent to Berlin, where he headed a special group of military and civilian specialists charged with taking over everything Germany had produced in rocket armament, in particular the A-4 (V-2). From May 1945 to February 1947 he remained in Germany as head of the computation-theory bureau of the Nordhausen institute, working under Major General L. M. Gaidukov and chief engineer S. P. Korolev to study the design and production technology of the German ballistic missile. That collaboration with Korolev would last for years. He published, with I. V. Livartovsky, a study on calculating the A-4 trajectory that for the first time gave atmospheric parameters up to 100 km, and in 1946 a monograph on the ballistics of long-range combat rockets.
In 1946 he became deputy head, then head, of the 13th (flight theory) department of the 4th (rocket) Main Artillery Directorate, and in February 1947 took charge of ballistic work on the first V-2 launches at Kapustin Yar. At the state central proving ground under construction in Astrakhan oblast he led the group of ballisticians that prepared the launch, guidance and aiming data and visually monitored and processed measurements of the powered phase of flight. Eleven A-4 launches were carried out between the first, on 18 October 1947, and 12 November 1947, and he took part in writing the detailed report and the report to the Soviet government. The return to the flight-mechanics and ballistics problems of Moscow University, which he had left to go to the front, began here; the transition turned an experimental launch program into the institutional foundation of a state capability.