'Aleksei Mihailovich Isaev' (
October 24,
1908, Saint Petersburg–
June 10,
1971, Moscow) was a
Russian
rocket engineer.
Aleksei Isaev began work under
Leonid Dushkin during
World War II, on an experimental rocket-powered
interceptor plane. In
1944 he formed his own design bureau to engineer liquid-propellant
engines. After abandoning the heavy, complex and undercooled
German engine designs, Russia's prinical engine designer
Valentin Glushko turned to Isaev's innovations: thin-walled
copper combustion chambers backed by
steel support, anti-oscillation
baffle to prevent chugging, and the flat injector plate with mixing-swirling injectors. The latter was an enormous simplification of the "plumbing nightmare" of the V-2 engine, because it avoided the need for separate fuel lines to each sprayer.
Although his inventions influenced the design of Glushko's large engines, Isaev was better known for building efficient small rockets. In 1951, his engine powered the R-11 short-range missile, later named the
Scud in the West. He designed a series of course-correction engines for Soviet planetary probes, including the
KDU-414 used in
Venera-1,
Mars-1 up to
Venera-8, the
KTDU-425 used in later planetary probes,
KTDU-5 used in the Soviet lunar landers
Luna-4 to
Luna-13.
Isaev was a corresponding member of the
USSR Academy of Sciences.
The
Isaev crater on the
far side of the
Moon is named after him.
References
★ Phillip Clark, ''The Soviet Manned Space Program'', Orien Books,
1988, ISBN 0-517-56954-X.
External links
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