Vasily Mishin

Vasily Mishin was a Soviet rocket engineer who served as First Deputy Chief Designer under Sergei Korolev at OKB-1, the Soviet Union's leading spacecraft design bureau, and succeeded Korolev as Chief Designer following Korolev's death in 1966. In that role he led development of the N1, the Soviet Union's answer to the American Saturn V intended to carry cosmonauts to the Moon, but the program suffered four consecutive launch failures between 1969 and 1972 and was ultimately canceled in 1974, after which Mishin was removed from his position and the Soviet crewed lunar program was abandoned. Earlier in his career he had contributed to Soviet reverse-engineering of the German V-2 rocket after the Second World War and to the development of the R-7 rocket family that launched Sputnik and Vostok, and he later taught aerospace engineering at the Moscow Aviation Institute for two decades, training generations of Soviet and Russian rocket engineers even after the political fall from favor that followed the N1 program's failure.