Nikolay Pilyugin

Nikolay Pilyugin was a Soviet chief designer of rocket guidance and control systems, born in Krasnoye Selo, who graduated from the Bauman Higher Technical School and began his engineering career at the Zhukovsky Central Institute of Aerohydrodynamics before joining the Reactive Scientific Research Institute in the 1930s. In 1945 he joined fellow engineer Boris Chertok at the RABE institute in occupied Germany, studying captured V-2 rockets and their guidance hardware, and the following year he and Mikhail Ryazansky were placed in charge of the newly formed NII-885 institute, tasked with developing Soviet rocket guidance electronics from scratch. Working closely with chief designer Sergei Korolev, Pilyugin developed the gyroscopic guidance systems and onboard flight control computers used in Soviet rockets beginning with the R-1, a reverse-engineered V-2, and continuing through the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile that later launched Sputnik and every early Soviet crewed mission; he also contributed guidance systems to the Soviet Buran space shuttle program. He was twice named a Hero of Socialist Labour and received the Lenin Prize for his work.