Founder of Soviet liquid rocketry: his engines carried Sputnik, Gagarin, and Buran
March 1924. Fifteen-year-old Glushko to Tsiolkovsky: "Interplanetary travel is my ideal, my life's goal — I shall devote myself to this great cause."
Born in Odessa, he began writing to Tsiolkovsky at sixteen and published a book on spaceflight. At the GDL from 1929, he tested the world's first electrothermal rocket engine and built the foundations of Soviet liquid rocketry. Arrested in 1938 and sentenced to eight years, he continued designing engines in a sharashka and was freed in 1944. As Chief Designer of OKB-456 (Energomash), his RD-107/108 engines on the R-7 rocket launched Sputnik and Gagarin. After Korolev's death he became General Designer of NPO Energia in 1974, leading the Soviet crewed space program for fifteen years and delivering the RD-170, the most powerful liquid rocket engine ever built, and the Energia-Buran system.
Career Timeline
- 1929Joined GDL; led electric and liquid rocket engine development
- 1933–38Developed ORM-series engines at the Rocket Research Institute (RNII)
- 1938–44Arrested, 8-year sentence; designed RD-1 auxiliary aircraft rocket in Kazan sharashka
- 1946–74Chief Designer of OKB-456: R-7 engines (RD-107/108), Proton engine (RD-253)
- 1957/1961Sputnik and Vostok/Gagarin launches; twice Hero of Socialist Labor
- 1974–89General Designer of NPO Energia; oversaw the Soviet crewed space program
- 1988Successful launch of the Energia-Buran system with RD-170 engines
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarDeveloped rocket-assisted takeoff engines for aircraft in a research institute and sharashka
- 1957–1965The Soviet Space ProgramChief engine designerAs Chief Designer of OKB-456 he developed the RD-107/108 engines for the R-7 rocket, making possible the launches of Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 (Gagarin). His engines became the standard for Soviet space launches thereafter.
Glushko and Korolev — The Propellant Dispute and the Fate of the Soviet Moon Race
Few ruptures in Soviet space history were as consequential as the falling-out between Glushko and Sergei Korolev. The two men had been comrades. In the 1930s at RNII, Glushko's ORM-65 powered Korolev's winged rocket 212 and the RP-318 rocket plane. In the 1940s at the Kazan sharashka, Korolev led an experimental group under Glushko's KB-2. But around 1960 their paths diverged irreversibly.
The core of the conflict was propellant choice. Glushko championed storable hypergolics, nitrogen tetroxide and UDMH, which ignite on contact and can sit loaded for months, as the standard for Soviet heavy lift. Korolev, having witnessed the 1960 Nedelin catastrophe firsthand, vehemently opposed toxic hypergolics and insisted on liquid oxygen with kerosene (cryogenic) and liquid hydrogen.
The rupture became catastrophic with the N-1 Moon rocket. When Korolev's OKB-1 requested engines for the N-1's first and second stages, Glushko refused, arguing that large single-chamber LOX/kerosene engines on the scale of the American F-1 were unworkable. He proposed his hypergolic RD-270 instead. Korolev refused. The N-1 engines went to Nikolai Kuznetsov's OKB-276, which had no experience with large liquid rocket engines, and the design settled on a complex cluster of 30 small engines in the first stage. This configuration never achieved reliability: all four N-1 test launches failed.
Personal wounds compounded the technical dispute. During the Great Purge of 1938, Glushko had denounced Korolev under NKVD interrogation; Korolev was sent to the Kolyma gulag and nearly starved to death. The two maintained a working relationship afterwards but, by most historical accounts, never trusted each other again. After Korolev's death in 1966, Glushko called the N-1's engines 'rotten,' and upon becoming General Designer of NPO Energia in 1974, his first major act was to cancel the entire N-1 program.
Glushko's alternative was the RD-170: a single turbopump feeding four combustion chambers, sidestepping the combustion-instability problem that had defeated large LOX/kerosene engines. The RD-170 flew successfully on the Energia rocket in 1987 and remains the most powerful liquid rocket engine ever built. Glushko also showed late-career flexibility by adopting liquid hydrogen, which he had long dismissed as 'completely impractical,' for the Energia core stage. But his two-decade insistence on hypergolics had exacted its price: while the United States built the F-1 and Saturn V, the Soviet Union lost the Moon.