Dmitry Kozlov

Dmitry Kozlov was a Soviet and Russian rocket engineer who founded what became the Progress Rocket Space Centre, the design bureau responsible for the Soyuz family of launch vehicles that remains in production into the twenty-first century. In the 1950s he worked under chief designer Sergei Korolev on the R-7, the missile whose design became the basis of the Soyuz rocket, and from 1958 he oversaw the R-7's serial production at a design office in the city of Kuibyshev, now Samara, which in 1960 became Filial 3 of Korolev's OKB-1 bureau with responsibility for all future derivatives of the R-7. In 1964 Korolev handed Kozlov's Samara bureau responsibility for the Zenit photo-reconnaissance satellites and military variants of the Soyuz spacecraft, and after the cancellation of the Soviet crewed lunar program in 1974 the bureau became fully independent as the Central Specialized Design Bureau under Kozlov, who led it as chief designer and director general from 1959 until 2003. He received the Lenin Prize in 1957, two Soviet State Prizes, and was twice named a Hero of Socialist Labour.