Valentin Petrovich Glushko (1908-1989) was a leading architect of the Soviet space effort and the founder of the Soviet school of liquid-propellant rocket engineering. Born in Odessa, he corresponded with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky as a teenager before joining Leningrad's Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) in 1929, where he built the first Soviet liquid-fuel rocket motors (the ORM series). From 1946 he headed the OKB-456 design bureau (later Energomash), developing the RD-107 and RD-108 engines of the R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik and Gagarin. An academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958) and twice Hero of Socialist Labour, in 1974 he took charge of NPO Energia, directing the Energia heavy-lift launcher and the Buran shuttle. As editor-in-chief of Kosmonavtika. Malenkaya entsiklopediya, he oversaw the first Soviet encyclopedia of the field.