My research in Russia focused on the history of liquid propellant rocket engine

(LPRE) design in the period 1945-1970. This centered on documents of the

Soviet Ministry of Aviation and the Ministry of Armaments, the two primary
centers of rocket-engine design and development, located at multiple archives
in Moscow and Samara. I analyzed the process of technology transfer from
the German V-2 program to the Soviet Union after the close of the Second
World War as well as elucidating why subsequent rocket engine development
in the Soviet Union followed a different path than in the United States.
Robert R. MacGregor
Princeton University
Research Country: Russia
March 15, 2010

SCHOLAR RESEARCH BRIEF:
THE TECHNOLOGICAL HISTORY OF SOVIET ROCKET ENGINE
DESIGN

The following opinions, recommendations, and conclusions of the author are his/her own
and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IREX or the US Department of State.

RESEARCH IN CONTEXT

For a time in the middle of the twentieth century
human spaceflight came to symbolize societal
progress, advancement, and the future of mankind.
The Space Age encapsulated enthusiasm about
technology and its ability to bring about salvation for
mankind. Many historians have analyzed the Space
Age from a political and cultural viewpoint (for
example Walter McDougalls Pulitzer prize-
winning the Heavens and the Earth: A Political
History of the Space Age). There are also a
plethora of studies and memoirs of astronauts and
their experiences, but few historians have tried to
trace the evolution of the technology of spaceflight
applying the methodologies of the social
construction of technological systems.

In engaging with the technological history
spaceflight, its important to note that space
hardware is at the edge of technological complexity,
integrating vast numbers of subsystems from
various fields of engineering such as inertial
guidance, radio telemetry, aerodynamics, etc. as
well as psychology, medicine, and even public
relations. A complete account of all aspects of such
complex systems is unattainable, so I have tried to
narrow the scope of analysis to the most canonical
aspect of spaceflight: the rocket engine itself.

Solid-fueld rocket motors have been around for as
long as fireworks have been entertaining crowds in
China, but the liquid propellant rocket engines birth
is traced to Robert Goddards experiments in the
late 1920s in the United States. Amateur rocket
groups in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet
Union expanded upon this work in the interwar
period. The coming of the Second World War led to
the weaponization of liquid rocket engines, most
famously in Nazi Germany under Werner von
Braun.

From Germany, liquid rocket engines would
emigrate to the Soviet Union and the United States
after the war, providing a unique example of a
comparative study of technology transfer. In
particular, differing attitudes in the United States
and the Soviet Union about what technology
transfer consisted of would have formative impacts
upon the early native space programs in the two
countries.

Historians of Technology are interested not only
in the ways technologies affect society, but also
in the reverse, that is how society and
individuals affect the construction and design of
new technological systems. In the case of
rocket engine design, there are many design
choices to be made, but often from only a finite
number of possible solutions (e.g. engine cycle,
fuel choice, oxidizer choice, etc.). It might be
expected that for similar applications engineers
would produce similar engines. That is, one
might expect similar engines to have been
produced in the Soviet Union and the United
States. But this is most definitely not the case.

In the United States, ICBMs were standardized
around solid rocket motors, and space launch
vehicles around cryogenic (liquid oxygen and
liquid hydrogen) liquid rocket engines. In the
Soviet Union, ICBMs standardized on liquid
hypergolic fuels, and space launchers on
hydrocarbon rocket engines. It remains an
unaswered question why the two countries
followed such sharply diverging technological
trajectories.

A Modified V-2 being launched in White Sands,
New Mexico

W W W . I R E X . O R G
1

RESEARCH PROCESS AND RESULTS

In tracing the history of liquid rocket engines in the
Soviet Union, I based my research on documents
housed in several archives. First were the
document collections of the Soviet War
Administration in Germany (SVAG) in the State
Archive of the Russian Federation. This gave an
overview of science-technical administration in and
the organization of rocket engine research in
Germany before transfer to the Soviet Union. Also
of importance were the notes and reports of the
committees sent to occupied Germany by the
Ministry of Aviation and Ministry of Armaments to
assess the state of German rocket engine research
and development. Next I accessed documents of
the experimental design bureau under Nikolai
Kuznetsov in Samara, Russia (OKB-276) that
developed the liquid rocket engines for the Soviet
lunar rocket (the N-1).
The story of the Cold War and the Space Race
begins amid the death and destruction of war-
ravaged Germany in the spring and summer of
1945. A process of technology transfer to the two
new superpowers began at the underground
Mittelwerk factory and the rocket research and
development site at Peenemnde on the island of
Usedom just off the German Baltic coast. Both the
United States and Soviet Union actively recruited
German rocket engineers (in the case of the Soviet
Union this was forcible recruitment) and they both
seized entire V-2s in various states of assembly. In
both the United States and Soviet Union indigenous
teams of rocket engine designers first aimed at
copying the V-2 engine design before embarking on
other high-thrust liquid propellant rocket engines.
The differing occupation regimes of the Soviet
Union and United States in post-war Germany led to
different types of technology transfer; not only
different types of technology transfer, but actually
different conceptions of what technology transfer
was.
1

The United States was chiefly interested in what we
might call intellectual capital, that is the brains
behind the German rocket program. The Soviet
Union, in contrast, saw technology transfer as a
material problem. The Soviets answered the
question what can we take from the German V-2?
not with the American answer, that is people, but
instead by aiming to transfer German expertise
without German experts.
At the close of hostilities in 1945 much of the
civil infrastructure of the Soviet Union had been
decimated. Some 27 million civilians and
soldiers had perished due to war, and entire
cities had been flattened by the German
Wehrmacht. This led to mistrust between
Russians and German experts working together
in occupied Germany. And while the Germans
sent to the Soviet Union were in general treated
well (at least by Soviet standards), they did not
integrate into local communities, as did their
counterparts who had been sent to Texas and
later to Alabama, eventually forming the core of
NASAs rocket design group at the Marshall
Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

In the Soviet Union early engine research was
centered at OKB-456 in Khimki northwest of
Moscow (now NPO Energomash) under the
leadership of chief designer Valentin Glushko.
Glushkos bureau, in parallel with developments
at Rocketdyne in the United States, recreated
the V-2 engine using domestic materials. The
other group, which would become the focus
point of space launch vehicle design and
construction was led by Sergei Korolev, at NII-
88 in podlipki (now Korolev) in northeast
Moscow. Korolev would go on to be the chief
designer of the first ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka
that launched both Sputnik in October 1957 and
Yuri Gagarin in April, 1961 into space. Already
by spring 1945 NII-88 was receiving multiple
train wagons of daily arrivals of German War
Materiel.
2

The differing means and ends by which
technology transfer was effected in the Soviet
and American occupations of Germany played a
2


Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the head of the post-
war Soviet missile program
paramount role in the appropriation of German
technology to the two states. Technology transfer
was an explicit goal of both the American and
Soviet occupations, yet the character by which
technology transfer operated in the two cases
differed for geopolitical and institutional reasons.

The Soviet Union had just undergone the most
massive mechanized war in history and huge
swaths of infrastructure, housing, and industry had
been leveled in the western regions of the Soviet
Union. The United States, in contrast, had remained
virtually unscathed throughout the war (the
exceptions being the attacks on Pearl Harbor and
the Aleutian islands as well as a single J apanese
balloon bomb that killed five children and a woman
in the woods of Oregon). The view of what could
and should be taken from Germany as spoils of war
was therefore highly dependent on whether one
was sitting in Washington or Moscow.

Operating in this geopolitical context, the Soviet
efforts at seizing German technology fitted into the
general chaos of the early days of the occupation.
The expropriation of German war materiel by the
trophy brigades of various industries and scientific
and development organizations in the wake of the
advancing front followed a decentralized modus
operandi. Boris Chertok, who would be one of
Korolevs deputies and close friends in later years,
noted that the rampant stealing of German
equipment by other Soviet organizations while it
was in transit led him to [prepare] the cases
containing instruments that had been retrieved by
Red Army soldiers and [I] waited for my airplane
to deliver them to my institute.
3
Even the famous
physicist Pyotr Kaptisa personally wrote letters
describing individual instruments he wanted to have
shipped back to him from the Karl Zeiss works.
4

The differing goals of the two superpowers is also
illustrated by the example that Soviet engineers
were amazed that while the American forces had
removed specialized equipment for rocket testing
they left behind all of the tools in the machine shops
at Mittelwerk. These types of precision tools (mills,
presses, oscilloscopes, etc.) were of vital
importance for stocking the shelves of Soviet R&D
centers while simultaneously being of no special
consideration to the American occupation` forces.

After coordinating with Soviet specialists in
occupied Germany, around 150 Germans were
forcibly relocated to the Soviet Union in October,
1946. These were a hodgepodge of mostly
lower-level technicians with the exception being
Helmut Grtrrup, who had been the deputy chief
of guidance engineering under Ernst Steinhoff at
Peenemunde. Some of these Germans were
dispersed among the Soviet agencies tasked
with rocket research and construction after the
war, while a large group of them was preserved
intact on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger
about 250 kilometers to the northwest of
Moscow. The group on Gorodomlya island tried
to compete in currying the favor of the military
leadership for more advanced rocket designs,
but ultimately failed to gain any real support.
The Germans also failed to maintain cohesion
as a group and they had problems trying to
assimilate into the growing Soviet space
complex. Korolev, for example, was himself in
1947 forced to intervene in a letter to the heads
of NII-88 and its factory advising them that it
was critical for German specialists to have the
power to sign off on construction blueprints, an
ability they were previously not granted.

The team of Germans continued to work on the
remote outpost on Lake Seliger until it was
decided in the summer of 1951 for them to be
repatriated back to East Germany. Over the
next two years almost all of them were sent
back, officially putting the Soviet rocket effort
into Russian hands.

A few general remarks can be made about the
mode of transfer of German rocket technology.
First, in both the United States and Soviet Union
technology transfer fit into a scheme of post-war
requisitioning of German industrial and
intellectual assets. In distinction to other modes
3



The Saturn V (top) compared to the Soviet N-1
(bottom). Sizes to scale.
RESEARCH PROCESS AND RESULTS

Body
CONTENT

Body
Picture, Graph, Quote
4

RESEARCH PROCESS AND RESULTS

Body
CONTENT

Body
Picture, Graph, Quote

of technology transfer this was a zero sum game.
The transfer of German rocket technology to the
United States and Soviet Union was coincident with
the extinction of the German rocket industry. For
the Soviet Union this was a welcome fact since the
demilitarization of Soviet industry was an explicit
goal of the occupation. For the United States, this
was a mixed blessing as with the Cold War looming,
it became conventional wisdom that a militarized
West Germany was essential for any European
security plan.

Second, the American and Soviet missions were
inflected in opposite ways; Operation Overcast
placed emphasis on personnel over materiel while
the disordered Soviet trophy brigades expropriated
materiel over personnel (albeit in haphazard
fashion).

Third, in both cases the transfer of the German
technology operated as a socio-technological
diaspora, that is, the transfer of entire groups of
engineers, technicians, and managers sharing a
community of practice in addition to the transfer of
actual rockets and equipment.

In the middle of the 1950s, as the Space Race with
the United States was gaining steam, a conflict
within the space complex of the Soviet Union on the
choice of propellants for liquid rocket engines was
growing. Korolev, aiming ultimately for a rocket
large enough for a moon mission, was by the late
1950s trying to convince Glushko to develop a
large liquid oxygen-hydrocarbon engine. Glushko
refused, preferring smaller engines, which could be
marketed to the military for ICBMs. Korolev then
turned to Nikolai Kuznetsov, the general designer of
an experimental designe bureau in Samara that had
a history of designing turboprop and jet engines.

Kuznetsovs bureau, beginning in 1959, would go
on to develop the engines for Korolevs moon,
rocket, the N-1. This development began with the
first ever closed-cycle rocket engine, which marked
a clear break from the linear narrative of improving
upon German rocket engine designs. In fact, the
infighting among Soviet designers (notably Korolev
and Glushko) led to the nativization of Soviet rocket
engine design, by transferring some of the design
work to competing bureaus.

Without any previous experience in rocket engine
design, Kuznetsov decided to make a gamble and
go for a novel new approach to the engine cycle, so
called staged-combustion. He later recalled:
"We did not have experience with engines of
either type, for us all will be new so there is no
sense for us to repeat the older method. I believe
that you need courage to go to a closed system,
no matter how difficult it may be proved. We
should not be afraid of overcoming the difficulties
in our life.
4

This situation could not have happened in the
United States, where the tightly hierarchical
relationships between the federal government and
private contractors meant that no such infighting
could occur. In the Soviet Union, personal
networks and relationships held the space
complex together, and any one design bureau
could aspire to be the future center of all space
efforts. Thus Glushko was hoping to solidify his
position against Korolev by refusing to build
engines for the lunar program, and this led to a
break in the technological trajectory of rocket
engine design in the Soviet Union that ultimately
led to the creation of the staged-combustion
engine.

The engine that was finally produced, the NK-15,
failed to gain prominence as both Korolevs death
in 1966 and the four failed launches of the N-1 led
to the scrapping of the NK-15. But its
descendent, the NK-33 rocket engine, was
purchased by Aerojet in the early 1990s and
continues to have a life in the United States.







"We did not have experience with
engines of either type, for us all will be
new so there is no sense for us to
repeat the older method. I believe that
you need courage to go to a closed
system, no matter how difficult it may
be proved. We should not be afraid of
overcoming the difficulties in our life.

Nikolai Kuznetsov, on adopting the
staged-combustion cycle.

CONTINUING RESEARCH

My research in Russia has provided a good
overview of Soviet efforts to domesticate German
technology in the immediate post-war period, as
well as a detailed analysis of the development of the
NK-15 engine in the 1960s for the Soviet N-1
booster.
This ability to analyze and distill this information will
be amplified by a careful consideration of activites in
the United States mirroring the Soviet experience
and leading to quite different technological
trajectories. While the Soviet moon booster, the N-
1, was powered by a staged-combustion
hydrocarbon engine (NK-15), the American Saturn
V booster critically relied on the use of a novel
cryogenic upperstage engine, the J -2, powered by a
liquid hydrogen and oxygen mix. The process by
which the United States arrived at this decision to
use a new and unfamiliar fuel (liquid hydrogen)
instead of increasing engine efficiencies with
familiar fuels (as in the Soviet Union) is still unclear
to me and bears further research.
By comparing and contrasting the two cases I hope
to gain an understanding of these differences,
notably the way in which the social, political,
cultural, and commercial milieu in the two
superpowers affected technological development in
the Cold War. The bureaucratic and technocratic
structures of the two states played a major role in
influencing design decisions and conceptions and
ultimately in the social construction of these
technological artifacts.

RELEVANCE TO POLICY COMMUNITY

The development of liquid propellant rocket
engines in the Soviet Union remains one of the
few examples of outstanding Soviet technology.
Indeed, the Soviet Union manufactured more
rocket engines, more types of rocket engines,
and launched more space vehicles than any
other nation in history. The Close of the Cold
War ushered in the cooperation agreements of
the Mir-Shuttle Phase I program, as well as
collaboration on the International Space Station.
American firms have also purchased Russian
space technology and hardware, including the
RD-180 rocket engine that powers the current
Atlas V rocket, and the NK-33 engine, a
derivative of the NK-15, which is planned for use
on the new Taurus II rocket developed by
Orbital Sciences Inc. and funded by NASAs
Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems
project.
With the scheduled phasing out of shuttle
launches, the United States is expected to be
dependent upon Russia for several years for
human spaceflight launches. There are many
reasons for this situation, but one of them is
certainly the lack of a cheap and effective
American liquid oxygen and kerosene engine,
the specialty of Soviet rocket engineers.
President Obamas recently announced budget
proposal for NASA both plans to cancel the
Constellation program as well as outlay money
for a native hydrocarbon engine on the lines of
Soviet models.
For these reasons, Soviet research and
development in liquid propellant rocket engines
should be of particular interest to the US space
community going forward, as well as issues of
technology transfer to maximize the applicability
of Soviet engines for American research and
development.
5

REFERENCES

Bijker, Hughes, et. al The Social Construction of Technological Systems, (MIT Press, 1989).
MacDougall, Walter A. the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, (Basic Books,
1986).
Siddiq, Asif. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974, (NASA, 2000).
Sutton, George P. The History of Liquid Propellant Rocket engines, (AIAA, 2006).


ENDNOTES

1. See, for example, the report issued by the Ministry of Armaments to Gosplan on German reactive
technology. RGAE, f.8157, op. 1, d. 1073.
2. RGAE f. 8157c, op. 1, d. 1006.
3. Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, (NASA, 2005), 236.

4. RGAE f. 8157c, op. 1, d. 1008
5.RGANTD filial, Samara. f. 876, op. 1, d. 6.

6



































IREX is an international nonprofit
organization providing leadership and
innovative programs to improve the
quality of education, strengthen
independent media, and foster
pluralistic civil society development.

Founded in 1968, IREX has an annual
portfolio of over $60 million and a staff
of 500 professionals worldwide. IREX
and its partner IREX Europe deliver
cross-cutting programs and consulting
expertise in more than 100 countries.
ABOUT TITLE VIII

The Title VIII Program, administered by
the Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, provides funding for research
and language training to American
scholars and students for the study
of Eastern Europe and Eurasia
(Independent States of the Former
Soviet Union). Title VIII maintains U.S.
expertise in the regions and brings open
source, policy-relevant research to the
service of the U.S. Government.

Grants under this program are awarded
through an open, national competition
among applicant organizations.
Authority for this Program for Research
and Training on Eastern Europe and
Eurasia (Independent States of the
Former Soviet Union) is contained in
the Soviet-Eastern European Research
and Training Act of 1983 (22 U.S.C.
4501-4508, as amended).
7

This Scholar Research Brief was
developed as part of the Individual
Advanced Research Opportunities
(IARO) Program, an IREX program
funded by the US Department of State.
IARO supports in-depth field research
by US students, scholars and experts in
policy-relevant subject areas related to
Eastern Europe and Eurasia, as well as
disseminates knowledge about these
regions to a wide network of
constituents in the United States and
abroad. The IARO Program plays a
vital role in supporting the emergence of
a dedicated and knowledgeable cadre
of US scholars and experts who can
enrich the US understanding of
developments in Eastern Europe and
Eurasia.

2121 K STREET, NW, SUITE 700
WASHINGTON, DC 20037
T +1 202 628 8188 | F +1 202 628
WWW.IREX.ORG