Leonid Dushkin

Leonid Stepanovich Dushkin (1910 to 1990) was a Soviet rocket engine designer, remembered as a major pioneer of Soviet rocket engine technology. Born in the Spirove settlement of the Tver region, he graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in mathematics and mechanics and in October 1932 joined Fridrikh Tsander's brigade of GIRD, the Moscow rocket research group. There he assisted in building the group's first rocket engine, the OR-2, and after Tsander's death oversaw engine number 10, which powered GIRD-X, the first Soviet liquid-fuel rocket. When GIRD and the Gas Dynamics Laboratory merged in 1933 he became part of the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, and from January 1938 he led the liquid propellant engine department of NII-3. His engines were among the first to be regeneratively cooled, and he moved the fuel injectors to a head at one end of a cylindrical chamber, the arrangement typical of modern design. His D-1-A-1100 engine was developed for the rocket-powered interceptor BI-1.