CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP AT NPO ENERGIYA

On 10 January 1989 NPO Energiya general designer Valentin P. Glushko passed away at age 80. On 8 April 1988 Glushko had suffered a stroke in his office, but wasn’t found until four hours later. He underwent complex neurological surgery the following day, but never made a full recovery. Glushko spent most of the final months of his life in hospital, watching the Energiya-Buran mission on television rather than witnessing it first hand [6].

Glushko’s death set in motion an internal battle within NPO Energiya to name his successor. On 23 January 1989 leading officials at NPO Energiya sent a letter to the Central Committee, VPK, and MOM, recommending Yuriy P. Semyonov as Glushko’s successor. After a six-year stint at Yangel’s OKB-586, Semyonov had

Glushko’s grave at Novodevichi cemetery (B. Vis).

Yuriy Semyonov (source: RKK Energiya).

joined Korolyov’s OKB-1 in 1964 and had quickly risen through the ranks of the design bureau, possibly helped by the fact that he was the son-in-law of the influential Politburo member Andrey Kirilenko, who also was the de facto head of the Soviet space program in his capacity as Central Committee Secretary for Defense Matters from 1979 to 1983. Semyonov began his career at OKB-1 as a leading designer of the Soyuz spacecraft and the L-1 (“Zond”) circumlunar vehicles, going on to become the chief designer of Soyuz and Salyut in 1972. After the split of the Energiya and Buran offices within NPO Energiya in 1981 he also became chief designer of Buran.

It wasn’t until 21 August 1989, after another appeal from leading NPO Energiya officials the month before, that Semyonov was officially named general designer of NPO Energiya, following in the footsteps of Korolyov, Mishin, and Glushko. One also wonders if there wasn’t unequivocal support from Minister of General Machine Building Vitaliy Doguzhiyev, a former classmate of Semyonov, although he left the post to Oleg Shishkin in July 1989. The official history of NPO Energiya (edited by Semyonov!) largely attributes the 7-month power vacuum at NPO Energiya to Boris Gubanov’s attempts to split off his rocket design department from the bureau and incorporate it into an independent design bureau for the creation of heavy-lift launch vehicles and upper stages. After the death of “rocket man’’ Glushko, Gubanov had evidently become worried about the future of his department within NPO Energiya, which did not only work on Energiya itself, but also on various derived launch vehicles that had no immediate relevance to the piloted space programs that were NPO Energiya’s main focus.

The June 1989 government decree resulting from the May meeting of the Defense Council had basically given the go-ahead for further development of such systems, but according to Gubanov’s memoirs the plans were scrapped by the so-called Scientific Technical Council of NPO Energiya on 18 August 1989 (three days before Semyonov’s official appointment). The only exception was Energiya-M, a lightweight version of Energiya. Gubanov describes this move as the “initial castration” of the Energiya program. According to the official NPO Energiya history the Council

divided the company’s space-related activities into five levels of priority:

(1) Energiya-Buran and Mir.

(2) Heavy payloads for Energiya, including a geostationary communications

platform.

(3) The Mir-2 space station and the further modification of Soyuz.

(4) Work on future air-launched systems (including reusable ones), spaceplanes,

“reusable multipurpose space systems’’, piloted Mars missions, further improve­ment of Energiya-Buran (including work on a reusable strap-on booster).

(5) Other work, including that on the Blok-D upper stage.

In September, Semyonov canceled plans for the GK-199 mission, ordering instead preparation of the Energiya vehicle 2L for the launch of a massive geostationary communications platform by the end of 1992, even though the development of such a platform and the upper stages to place it into the required orbit were only in an embryonic stage.

On 28 August 1989 Gubanov wrote a letter to Gorbachov, warning him that the Energiya program was to suffer the same fate as the N-1 unless action was taken to make it economically viable. He once again outlined plans for Energiya-M, cargo versions of the standard Energiya, and fully reusable versions of Energiya, arguing that such systems could save costs by orbiting heavier satellites with more built-in redundancy and hence longer lifetimes. Effective development of such rocket systems, Gubanov once again stressed, could only be performed by a specialized design bureau. Gorbachov directed the task of looking into that possibility to Oleg Baklanov, who was now the Central Committee Secretary for Defense Matters after having served as Minister of General Machine Building from 1983 until 1988. One option considered was a merger of three organizations based in Kuybyshev—namely, the Volga Branch of NPO Energiya, the Central Specialized Design Bureau (TsSKB), and the Progress factory. The idea met with stiff opposition from Semyonov and TsSKB chief Dmitriy Kozlov, the latter having already refused to become involved in Energiya in the mid-1970s.

On 29 September 1989 a new structure was officially approved for NPO Energiya. Responsibility for the orbiter was now in the hands of Department 351 under the leadership of V. N. Pogorlyuk. Gubanov remained in his function as chief designer of the entire Energiya-Buran system, but the sections working under him on future versions of Energiya were abolished. A final decision on the creation of a new launch vehicle design bureau was to be made at a meeting of the Central Committee in March 1990, but no consensus was reached, leaving the issue unresolved. At a meeting on 7 May 1990 the Scientific Technical Council of NPO Energiya decided that the formation of such a bureau was “inexpedient”. Gubanov was eventually dismissed from NPO Energiya on 5 March 1992 for his involvement in a deal between the Progress factory and an organization called Kazakhobshchemash to sell Soyuz rockets to Kazakhstan, although Gubanov himself saw it as just an excuse to get rid of him. With that move the post of “chief designer of Energiya-Buran’’ was officially abolished. Gubanov retired and passed away in 1999 [7].