[1] Mishin was one of the first Soviet specialists to see Nazi Germany's V-2 facilities at the end of World War II, along with others such as Sergei Korolev, who preceded him as the OKB-1 design bureau head, and Valentin Glushko, who succeeded him.

[1] He inherited the N1 rocket program, intended to land a man on the Moon, but which turned out to be fatally flawed (largely due to lack of adequate funding).

[11] The third N1 launch occurred on 22 June 1971, after improvements were made to KORD, the cabling, and fuel pumps, and the addition of an extinguishment system and filters.

The rocket preceded farther than its predecessors, but shortly before the first stage was to separate one engine caught fire, causing the entire structure to explode, but not before the escape system activated.

[15] He was described by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as "not [having] the slightest idea how to cope with the many thousands of people, the management of whom had been loaded onto his shoulders, nor make the huge irreversible government machine work for him.

"[1] In May 1967, Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov criticised Mishin's "poor knowledge of the Soyuz spacecraft and the details of its operation, his lack of cooperation in working with the cosmonauts in flight and training activities" and asked Nikolai Kamanin for him to be cited in the official report into the Soyuz 1 crash, which killed Vladimir Komarov.

[17] On 15 May 1974, while he was in the hospital, Mishin was replaced by a rival, Chief Engine Designer Valentin Glushko, after all four N1 test launches failed.