Aleksei Isaev

Aleksei Isaev was a Soviet rocket engineer who founded his own design bureau in 1944 to develop small liquid-fuel rocket engines, going on to create engines that powered a remarkable range of Soviet space firsts between 1957 and 1967, including the launch vehicles for the first artificial satellite, the first crewed spaceflight, and the earliest uncrewed Soviet probes sent toward the Moon and Venus. Earlier in his career, during the Second World War, he worked under fellow engineer Leonid Dushkin on the Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1, an experimental rocket-powered interceptor aircraft, one of the Soviet Union's first attempts at rocket propulsion for piloted flight. He specialized in engines for spacecraft maneuvering, braking and orbital insertion rather than the large boosters built by contemporaries such as Korolev's bureau, and his engines were used on the Vostok, Voskhod and early Soyuz spacecraft as well as numerous Soviet lunar and planetary probes. The design bureau he founded continued after his death in 1971 under the name the A.M. Isayev Chemical Engineering Design Bureau, remaining a significant Russian rocket engine manufacturer into the twenty-first century.