Valentin Glushko

• 1. Introduction

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  Valentin Petrovich Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa, and by the age of fourteen he was thinking about flight. Novels by Jules Verne had pulled him toward aeronautics. In 1923 he wrote a letter to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It was the first sign of a lifelong pull toward rockets.

  How did a teenager trained for factory work come to design rocket engines for the Soviet Union? How did a man locked in prison by the state end up running its entire space program? And why do engineers still argue over the choices he made?

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• 2. Odesa Apprentice

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  His father was a Ukrainian cossack and his mother was a Russian peasant. On the old calendar, his birthday fell on the 21st of August.

  At a trade school in Odesa he learned sheet metal work. After graduating, he apprenticed at a hydraulics fitting plant. He trained first as a fitter and then moved to work as a lathe operator.

  Around Odesa, unexploded artillery shells left behind by the retreating White Guards gave him material for experiments with explosives. Between 1924 and 1925 he wrote articles about exploring the Moon. He also wrote about using Tsiolkovsky's proposed engines for space flight.

  At Leningrad State University he studied physics and mathematics, but the specialty programs failed to hold his interest. He reportedly left without a degree in April 1929.

  From 1929 to 1930 he pursued rocket research at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, known as GDL. A new section there studied liquid-propellant and electric engines. In 1931 GDL merged with the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, called GIRD. The result was the Reactive Scientific Research Institute in Moscow, and Glushko became a member.

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• 3. Prison and Wartime

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  On the 23rd of March 1938, the NKVD rounded up Glushko during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and placed him in Butyrka prison. By the 15th of August 1939 he had been sentenced to eight years of imprisonment.

  The sentence did not keep him from engineering. He was put to work on various aircraft projects alongside 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.

  That same year, Sergei Korolev and Glushko designed the RD-1 kHz auxiliary rocket motor. It was tested in a fast-climb La-7R, an aircraft meant to help protect the capital from high-altitude attacks by the Luftwaffe.

  When World War II ended, Glushko was sent to Germany and Eastern Europe to study the German rocket program.

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• 4. Engines for Missiles

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  Under the name Colonel Glushko, he attended an Operation Backfire launch as part of that study of German rocketry.

  In 1946 he became chief designer of his own bureau, called OKB 456. He held that post until 1974. The bureau was later renamed NPO Energomash, and it played a prominent role in the development of Soviet rocket engines.

  The RD-101 engine, with 35 metric tons (340 kilonewtons) of thrust, powered the R-2. The RD-110, at 120 tons (1,180 kilonewtons), was used in the R-3. The 44-ton (430 kilonewton) RD-103 went into the R-5 Pobeda, known in the West as the SS-3 Shyster.

  The R-7, nicknamed Semyorka, carried four of his RD-107 engines and one RD-108.

  In 1954 he began designing engines for the R-12 Dvina, a missile Mikhail Yangel had designed. The West called it the SS-4 Sandal. He also became responsible for supplying engines to Sergei Korolev, designer of the R-9 Desna, known as the SS-8 Sasin. Korolev would soon become the center of Glushko's fiercest disagreement.

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• 5. The Fuel Feud

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  In 1965, after the UR-500 booster began flying, the Chelomei Bureau offered the UR-700 as a rival to Korolev's N-1. It was a booster in the class of the American Saturn V, with nine engines the size of the F-1. Its propellants were dinitrogen tetroxide and UDMH.

  Korolev was an outspoken opponent of hypergolic propellants, which ignite on contact, because they are toxic. He often cited the 1960 Nedelin catastrophe as evidence of the danger. He had objected to the UR-500 for the same reason.

  Glushko backed Vladimir Chelomei's UR-700. He also backed an even more powerful UR-900 with a nuclear-powered upper stage. When Korolev kept protesting, Glushko replied that the United States launched its crewed Gemini spacecraft on a Titan II rocket using very similar propellants. For the Americans, he said, it was not a safety issue.

  He also argued that the N-1 could not work. In his view, the Soviets could not build kerosene and liquid oxygen engines, called RP-1/LOX engines, on the scale of the Saturn F-1.

  The UR-700, Glushko said, could make possible a direct-ascent trajectory to the Moon. He considered that safer and more reliable than the rendezvous-and-dock method used by Apollo and by Korolev's N-1 proposals. He imagined the UR-700 and UR-900 serving lunar bases, crewed Mars missions, outer planet probes and orbiting battle stations.

  Korolev died in January 1966, and his deputy Vasily Mishin took over the OKB-1 design bureau. Mishin persuaded the Kremlin to terminate the UR-700 and UR-900 project, along with the RD-270 engine Glushko had planned for it. He cited the tremendous risk of a low-altitude launch failure and the waste of building two heavy-lift launcher families at once.

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• 6. Taking Command

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  By 1973 the Soviet crewed lunar effort had failed completely. Uncrewed Mars missions had also failed, and four cosmonauts had died. Mishin was fired that year, and the Kremlin decided to consolidate the whole Soviet space program into one organization headed by Glushko.

  In 1974, after six successful American Moon landings, Premier Leonid Brezhnev cancelled the troubled Soviet program to send a man to the Moon. Mishin's OKB-1, which had been Korolev's design bureau, and other bureaus were merged into a single bureau under Glushko. It was later named NPO Energia. He served as program manager of the Soviet space program from 1974 until 1989.

  His first act was to suspend the N-1 rocket, a program he had long criticized. It was not formally terminated until 1976. The irony was sharp. One reason for the N-1's troubles was Glushko's own refusal to design the high-power engines Korolev needed. The cause was friction between the two men and, ostensibly, a disagreement over cryogenic versus hypergolic fuel.

  His team sat within the Soviet Ministry of General Machine Building, headed by Minister Sergey Afanasyev. Glushko then began work on a completely new heavy-lift launcher.

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• 7. Energia and Buran

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  As the United States developed the Space Shuttle, Glushko decided that his new launcher, Energia, would use only liquid-fueled engines. A liquid-hydrogen core stage took the place of the Shuttle's main engines. Liquid boosters burning LOX/RP-1 in RD-170 engines replaced the Shuttle's solid-propellant strap-on boosters.

  The RD-120 engine for the Energia core stage was developed quickly and with little difficulty. The RD-170 proved harder to work out. Glushko settled on an engine with four combustion chambers fed from a single propellant feed line.

  The strap-on boosters powered by the RD-170 became the basis for the Zenit booster family, which began flying in 1985.

  The Buran space shuttle was not ready for operations when Energia first flew in May 1987. The maiden flight instead carried a prototype space station module called Polyus. Buran did fly the following summer, a few months before Glushko's death.

  Energia and Buran lost their funding after the collapse of the USSR. The RD-170 engines and their derivatives are still flying today. The hydrogen engine experience gained on Energia was later used in upper stages such as Briz.

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• 8. Verdicts and Honours

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  Division chief Yuri Demyanko named Glushko's most significant engineering failure as his insistence that hydrogen was unsuitable as a rocket fuel. The Soviet program was still discussing hydrogen engines while the Americans were assembling the Saturn V launcher.

  Demyanko also pointed out that the bureau never managed a kerosene and liquid oxygen engine with a large combustion chamber to rival the F-1. Glushko's answer was the RD-270, a single large-chamber engine burning hypergolic propellants. It had almost the same thrust as the F-1 and better specific impulse, a measure of engine efficiency. It also used the advanced full-flow, staged, closed-cycle concept, rather than the simple open-cycle gas generator design of the F-1.

  Demyanko saw a primary reason for the N-1's failure here. Korolev insisted on kerosene and liquid oxygen, which Glushko felt would take much more time and money. The N-1 was therefore forced to rely on a multitude of smaller engines. Glushko never overcame the combustion instability of large kerosene engines.

  Glushko died on the 10th of January 1989. Several Communist Party leaders signed his obituary, including Mikhail Gorbachev. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Before his death he had appointed Boris Gubanov as his successor.

  He was twice named Hero of Socialist Labour, in 1956 and 1961. He received the Order of Lenin five times, between 1956 and 1978. He won the Lenin Prize in 1957 and the USSR State Prize in 1967 and 1984.

  Asteroid number 6357, discovered in 1976, was named for him by Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh. A crater on the Moon carries his name, and he is an honorary citizen of Korolyov. In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, an avenue is named after him.

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