Nikolai Kuznetsov

Nikolai Kuznetsov was a Soviet aircraft and rocket engine designer, distinct from the Soviet admiral of the same name, who served as chief designer of the Kuznetsov Design Bureau in Samara (then Kuibyshev), where from 1959 he led development of the liquid-fuel rocket engines intended for the N1, the Soviet Union's answer to the American Saturn V for crewed lunar missions. His bureau's NK-15 engines, later refined into the more powerful NK-33 and NK-43, powered the N1's first and second stages; the N1 program used an unusually large number of relatively small engines, thirty on the first stage alone, a configuration driven partly by Kuznetsov's background in aircraft turbine engines rather than large liquid rocket motors, and the program suffered four launch failures before cancellation in 1974. Decades later, after the Cold War, the surviving stockpile of unused NK-33 engines his bureau had built was rediscovered by American companies and, after modification, flown commercially on the Antares and Soyuz-2.1v launch vehicles, giving Kuznetsov's rocket engine design a second operational life more than thirty years after it was built for a program that never reached the Moon.