Talk:Valentin Glushko

Biography
The first sentence in the biography "His father was Ukrainian and his mother worked as a nurse." reads like a mockery of the famous self-description by Vladimir Zhirinovsky: "My mother was Russian, and my father was a lawyer." Can anyone with knowledge of the subject improve the sentence?--Pecher 21:15, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Old talk
Please mark the following sections:

"On March 23, 1938 he became caught up in Stalin's Great Terror and was rounded up by the NKVD, to be placed in the Butyrka prison. By August 15, 1939 he was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. Despite his supposed imprisonment, however, Glushko was put to work on various aircraft projects with other arrested scientists. In 1941 he was placed in charge of a design bureau for liquid-fueled rocket engines. He was finally released in 1944 by special decree."

and

"For many years Glushko had worked in Korolev's shadow, and certainly never received the credit he deserved (at the time) for his contributions. His personality was reputed to be bull-headed, and he never lacked for an ego."

These are some serious misinterpretations of the events! In fact, It was Sergey Korolyov who was accused and sent to the Gulag (because of favouring liquid fuelled rocket propulsion). It was Glushko who denounced Korolyov! And it was Sergei Korolyov who was forced to work for Glushko. Their mutual antipathy escalated after Korolyov came to know that he was accused because of Glushko. Korolyov was later completely rehabilitated. Therefore, the second section I mentioned is inappropiate, to say the least.

For sources, take a look at Korolyov's article (see the link above).

--Blazs 14:08, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * both Glushko and Korolev were arrested and Glushko was forced to denounce Korolev under torture, by some reports. In any case, this biography is rather poor and innacurate.  DonPMitchell 15:31, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the refinement! --Blazs 08:39, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Still needs work
Both the Glushko and Korolev biographies deserve to be better. For Korolev, there is no excuse, because Yaroslav Golovanov's biography is detailed and respected. A lot of information on Glushko is autobiographical and perhaps self-serving, but there is plenty of information about him.

I urge some caution with regard to the biography on Encyclopedia Astronautica, because it toes the line of a particular nationist German historian who claims that all of Russian rocket inventions were made by captured Germans. There is no documentary evidence at all that Germans designed the KS-50, ED-140 or RD-105 engines or had anything to do with the R-7 packet rocket design. This is just stated without proof in the articles and books by this historian and parroted on the astronautix.com site. Russian documentation multiple eyewitness accounts all claim that the Germans worked on the R-1 project and were completely isolated from more advanced missile projects, for security reasons. The Germans who worked in the Soviet Union were almost all debriefed by the CIA and some by von Braun. Yet none of these claims about inventing later rocket and engine technology appeared until the 1990s, after technical details of those missiles were made public by Russian sources. I fear these conspiracy theories will be dragged into wikipedia, and we will never hear the end of it.

I recommend looking at articles on Soviet rocket engines by the American engineer George Sutton, and articles and books by Asif Siddiqi. For a scholarly treatment of the German work in USSR, look at Michael Uhl's book "Stalins V2" (in German). DonPMitchell (talk) 19:52, 8 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The reference link to Encyclopedia Astronautica (deleted by @Ilenart626 in July 2022 as "unreliable", see diff) was restored because the RfC for the reliability of Encyclopedia Astronautica concluded that "there appears to be a consensus that this is a valuable resource". With regard to the dispute of German influence on engine design and tests, details of KS-50 "Liliput", ED-140 and RD-105 can be found in this Russian source Предыстория создания ЖРД РД-107/108 (Background to the creation of the liquid rocket engine RD-107/108). SchmiAlf (talk) 11:57, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

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