and its derivatives are still flying today and the experience in LH2 engines made during the Energia project would be used in later upper stages such as Briz. Glushko's team was part of the Soviet Ministry of General Machine Building headed by Minister Sergey Afanasyev. Before his death, he appointed Boris Gubanov to become his successor. Glushko died on January 10, 1989. His obituary was signed by multiple Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Perhaps his most significant engineering failure, as noted by division chief Yuri Demyanko, was his insistence that hydrogen fuel was unsuitable for use as a rocket fuel. As a result, the Soviet space program was still discussing the use of hydrogen-fueled engines while the Americans were assembling the Saturn V launcher. Also, Glushko's design bureau consistently failed at building a rocket engine powered by LOX/Kerosene with a large combustion chamber to rival the American F-1 used on the Saturn V; instead, his solution was the RD-270, a single large combustion-chamber engine powered by hypergolic propellants which had almost the same thrust and better specific impulse when compared to the F-1 engine. In addition, the RD-270 used the very advanced full-flow, staged, closed-cycle combustion concept as opposed to the simple open-cycle gas generator design used by the F-1 rocket engine. This was a primary reason for the failure of the N-1, which was forced to rely on a multitude of smaller engines for propulsion since Sergei Korolev, its chief designer, insisted on using the LOX/Kerosene combination, which Glushko felt would take much more time and money to design. Glushko never did overcome the combustion instability problems of large rocket engines using kerosene propellants; his eventual solution for this is seen on the RD-170 which is basically four smaller combustion chamber/nozzle assemblies sharing common fuel delivery systems. This solution and engine gave the Soviets the large thrust propulsion needed to build the Energia super heavy-lift launch vehicle, and is probably the finest example of Glushko's technical abilities when he was at his best. Honours and awards Hero of Socialist Labour, twice (1956, 1961) Order of Lenin, five times (1956, 1958, 1961, 1968, 1978) Order of the October Revolution (1971) Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1945) Jubilee Medal "For Valiant Labour. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" (1970) Jubilee