Kourken "Cookie" Samuelian was an Engineer on Apollo Space Project.

Kourken Samuelian was born on 2/13/24 in a Cambridge, MA house and was raised in Watertown, MA. He was known throughout his life to family, friends and colleagues as "Cookie", a nickname which originated during childhood games of "cops and cookies".

His collegiate career at Northeastern University in Boston was suspended when he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was serving as an instructor in the 57th Anti-Aircraft Training Battalion when he was chosen to participate in a strategic initiative of the armed services that selected qualified servicemen for university training in engineering sciences. During the program, he attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, achieving a certificate of graduation in mechanical engineering and participated in basic scientific research, which would later be revealed as groundwork for the Manhattan Project. After being honorably discharged after the war, he completed studies at Northeastern, earning a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1947.

His early career was spent as a design engineer at the Dewey & Almy Chemical Company Cryovac division in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the head of the engineering department at the MacGregor Instrument Company in Needham, Massachusetts.

He spent the lion's share of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Instrumentation Laboratory in Cambridge, which was later spun-off as the independent Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. At MIT/Draper, he participated in the design, fabrication, construction, testing and delivery of various inertial guidance and navigation systems for ballistic missiles, space systems and deep submergence submarines over a 28-year career. He served as the site activation manager in the Apollo Group during the height of the space race with the Soviet Union. He supervised the design and construction of Apollo project field sights and the installation of the inertial guidance and navigation equipment in the Apollo Command and Lunar Module vehicles. In recognition of his contributions to the Apollo project, he received letters of commendation from NASA and MIT. He was also the recipient of a medallion minted of metal from the capsule that returned astronauts from the first lunar landing in 1969. He retired in 1982.

Mr. Samuelian