Georgy Babakin

Georgy Babakin was a Soviet spacecraft engineer who became Chief Designer of the Lavochkin design bureau in 1965, inheriting a planetary exploration program that had not produced a successful mission since Luna 3 six years earlier. Babakin introduced systematic engineering discipline that had been largely absent under the bureau's previous management, including thorough bench and dynamics testing of spacecraft components before flight, and the results followed quickly: successful missions in 1966 and 1967 included Luna 9, the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and Venera 4, the first probe to transmit data from within the atmosphere of another planet. Under his leadership the bureau went on to develop the Lunokhod robotic lunar rovers, additional Venera landers, and the Luna sample-return missions that brought lunar soil to Earth without a human crew. Babakin died of a heart attack in 1971 while several of these programs, including the Mars 2 and Mars 3 probes and the first Lunokhod mission, were still in progress; craters on both the Moon and Mars are named in his honor, as is the Lavochkin bureau's Babakin Space Centre.