Mikhail Tikhonravov

Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov (1900 to 1974) was a Soviet engineer and a pioneer of spacecraft design and rocketry. Born in Vladimir, he studied at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, worked on gliders, and from 1931 turned to rockets, leading a brigade of the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion that launched the liquid fuelled GIRD-09 rocket in 1933. He then worked in the Reactive Scientific Research Institute and, after the war, at the artillery academy institute NII-4, where in 1948 he proposed packet rockets whose engines fire in parallel. His team designed Sputnik-3, the early lunar probes and the first Venus and Mars probes, and in 1956 he moved with it into Sergey Korolev's design bureau. He was a lead scientist behind the Sputnik 1 rocket and satellite, proposed the clustered booster idea of the R-7 rocket, oversaw the Vostok design, and is credited with popularising the word cosmonaut.