Vasily Mishin, 84; Led Soviet Space Program

Russian space designer Vasily Mishin, who spearheaded the botched Soviet effort to reach the moon before the United States, has died in Moscow. He was 84.

Mishin’s death on Oct. 10 was reported by the Russian media, which hailed him as one of the founders of the once-glorious Soviet space program.

Mishin worked alongside Sergei Korolyov, a legendary space designer whose team put the world’s first satellite in orbit in 1957 and sent the first human into space in 1961. After Korolyov’s death in 1966, Mishin took over the Soviet space program and led the massive effort to outpace the Americans in the moon race.

American astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, while the Soviet program collapsed amid a series of cosmonaut deaths and rocket explosions, leading to Mishin’s ouster in 1974. He said in a newspaper interview earlier this year that his dismissal ruined his life and made him consider suicide.

“My life ended,” Mishin told the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “I was deprived of everything I was living for. I even wanted to put an end to my life.”

Mishin was transferred to an obscure teaching job, leading Western observers to believe he was dead. He resurfaced during former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign for greater political openness in the late 1980s, when he started giving interviews about the Soviet space program.

Speaking to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Mishin said that his moon project was doomed because it lacked the necessary funds and that the Soviet Union shouldn’t have entered the moon race.

“The Soviet Union, which won primacy in space in many fields, didn’t have to compete with the Americans for putting the first human on the moon,” Mishin said. “But the official decision was made; albeit it happened too late and wasn’t backed by the necessary funds.”

Mishin said Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rejected a U.S. proposal to include a Soviet cosmonaut in the Apollo crew flying to the moon.

“[Krushchev] apparently decided that the proposal was humiliating for the USSR, even though it took him a long time to give the orders to launch our own moon mission.”

Mishin, who was born in the Moscow region and joined the Communist Party in 1943, described frantic efforts to develop a huge N-1 booster for the moon mission, saying his team had trouble synchronizing the function of its numerous engines.

“We finally developed the necessary mechanism, but it was too late,” he said in the interview. “Our moon program was shut down, and the unused boosters were destroyed.”

James Oberg, a leading U.S. expert on the Soviet and Russian space programs, said Mishin was not to blame for the failure of the moon program. “He just happened to be the man in charge when all the ambitious technological challenges began to crumble in the face of the relentless American Apollo juggernaut,” Oberg told the Associated Press.