Aleksandr Yakovlevich Orlov (Russian: Александр Яковлевич Орлов; 6 April 1880, Smolensk – 28 January 1954, Kyiv) was an astronomer and pioneer of geodynamics.

[1] In 1927, Orlov was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union; in 1934-38 he was a professor of astronomy at the P. K. Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow.

From 1938 to 1951, he again headed the Poltava Observatory, and in 1939 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

[2] He contributed the essay “Astronomic Utopias” to the 1928 book Life and Technology of the Future in which he discussed the possibility of settling on Mars and the Moon.

[3] Orlov played a major role in the creation of the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, based in Golosseevo outside Kyiv.