Kerim Kerimov

Kerim Kerimov was an Azerbaijani-Soviet rocket engineer and general who served as Chairman of the State Commission on Piloted Flights, the body overseeing every Soviet and later Russian crewed spaceflight, for twenty-five years from 1966 until 1991. Appointed to the role shortly after the death of chief designer Sergei Korolev, whom he had worked closely with, Kerimov supervised the development and operation of the Soyuz spacecraft and the Salyut space station program, as well as uncrewed interplanetary missions, and was one of the small circle of Soviet officials whose identity and role in the space program were kept secret from the public for decades, an anonymity typical of senior Soviet space officials during the Cold War. He personally managed the response to the fatal Soyuz 11 mission in 1971, in which three cosmonauts died during reentry after a cabin depressurization, and he continued overseeing Soviet piloted spaceflight operations through the Mir space station era into the early 1990s, one of the longest tenures of any space program official worldwide.