Mikhail Tikhonravov

Mikhail Tikhonravov was a Soviet rocket engineer and theorist who, after encountering Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's spaceflight writings as a student, joined the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, known as GIRD, in 1932 and led the team that built and launched the GIRD-09, one of the Soviet Union's first liquid-fuel rockets, in August 1933. In 1948 he proposed the concept of a multistage rocket with its engines arranged in a parallel cluster, or packet, to extend flight range, an idea initially dismissed by colleagues as impractical but later adopted as the basic configuration of the R-7, the rocket family that launched Sputnik, Vostok and every subsequent Soviet and Russian crewed mission. His research team, transferred to Sergei Korolev's OKB-1 bureau in 1956, went on to design Sputnik 3 and early Soviet lunar, Venus and Mars probes, and Tikhonravov is credited with coining the Russian term for space traveler, cosmonaut. He received the Lenin Prize in 1957 for his role in the Sputnik launch, and a crater on Mars is named in his honor.