Semyon Kosberg

Semyon Ariyevich Kosberg (1903-1965) was a Russian chief designer of rocket engines. From 1941 until his death in 1965 he served as Chief Designer of OKB-154, the design bureau whose successor is listed as the Kosberg bureau, a Russian manufacturer of rocket engines. His bureau led the work on engines for intercontinental ballistic missiles and for space launchers. The record of Soviet launch commissions shows him as the engineer called to explain engine problems: in March 1961 he gave testimony to a commission whose members included Keldysh, Korolev, Sokolov, Glushko and Bogomolov on the causes of the RO-7 engine failure of 22 December 1960, which had sent a Vostok capsule on a suborbital flight and a landing at Tura. In October 1964, before the Voskhod 1 crewed launch, he argued that a third stage engine explosion on a test stand was caused by the stand and not by the flight engine, noting that his engines had flown 60 times and been tested on the stand 400 times.