Chief designer of the Duga 'Woodpecker' radar
4 referenced events from the UVB-76 - The Buzzer archive.
Franz Aleksandrovich Kuzminsky is born in the village of Pokatilov. He will study at the Moscow Aviation Institute, volunteer for air-defence duty in 1941, and after the war become one of the Soviet Union's leading radar designers.
Kuzminsky becomes chief engineer of NIIDAR, the institute for long-distance radio communications, and turns to the problem of seeing beyond the horizon, detecting a missile launch by the radar echo bounced off the ionosphere.
Under Kuzminsky's leadership NIIDAR completes the outline design of the Duga (5N32) over-the-horizon radar and builds the experimental station that detects Baikonur launches at 2,500 km. He becomes NIIDAR's director in 1975.
Kuzminsky dies in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolves, two years after his greatest creation, the Woodpecker, fell silent over the shortwave bands. The rusting arrays outlive him.