Valentin Petrovich Glushko (; ; born 2 September 1908 – 10 January 1989) was a Soviet engineer and the main designer of rocket engines in the Soviet space program during the heights of the Space Race between United States and the Soviet Union. Biography At the age of fourteen he became interested in aeronautics after reading novels by Jules Verne. He is known to have written a letter to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1923. He studied at an Odessa trade school, where he learned to be a sheet metal worker. After graduation he apprenticed at a hydraulics fitting plant. He was first trained as a fitter, then moved to lathe operator. During his time in Odessa, Glushko performed experiments with explosives. These were recovered from unexploded artillery shells that had been left behind by the White Guards during their retreat. From 1924 to 1925 he wrote articles concerning the exploration of the Moon, as well as the use of Tsiolkovsky's proposed engines for space flight. He attended Leningrad State University where he studied physics and mathematics, but found the specialty programs were not to his interest. He reportedly left without graduating in April, 1929. From 1929 to 1930 he pursued rocket research at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL), where a new research section was set up for the study of liquid-propellant and electric engines. He became a member of the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, founded in Moscow in 1931 when GDL merged with the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD) On 23 March 1938 he became caught up in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and was rounded up by the NKVD, to be placed in the Butyrka prison. By 15 August 1939 he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment; however, Glushko was put to work on various aircraft projects with other arrested scientists. In 1941 he was placed in charge of a design bureau for liquid-fueled rocket engines. He was finally released in 1944. In 1944, Sergei Korolev and Glushko designed the RD-1 kHz auxiliary rocket motor tested in a fast-climb Lavochkin La-7R for protection of the capital from high-altitude Luftwaffe attacks. At the end of World War II, Glushko was sent to Germany and Eastern Europe to study the German rocket program. As part of this he attended an Operation Backfire launch as Colonel Glushko. In 1946, he became the chief designer of his own bureau, the OKB 456,