Sergey Afanasyev

Sergey Afanasyev was a Soviet engineer and government minister who led the Soviet Union's entire space and missile manufacturing industry as head of the Ministry of General Machine-Building from its creation in March 1965 until 1983, a role sometimes informally described as the world's first 'Space Minister.' Building the new ministry essentially from scratch, he unified numerous defense plants, design bureaus and research institutes responsible for producing Soviet ballistic missiles, launch vehicles and spacecraft under a single organizational structure overseeing a workforce reportedly numbering in the hundreds of thousands, coordinating the industrial side of programs including Soyuz, Salyut and later Energia-Buran while chief designers such as Sergei Korolev, Vasily Mishin and Valentin Glushko led individual technical bureaus beneath the ministry's umbrella. Because the ministry's existence and function were treated as a state secret for most of the Cold War, Afanasyev's role was not publicly acknowledged until the late 1980s, despite his central position directing the industrial capacity behind the entire Soviet space program for nearly two decades.