The Ministry of General Machine-Building (Russian: Министерство общего машиностроения; MOM), also known as Minobshchemash, was a government ministry of the Soviet Union from 1955 to 1957 and from 1965 to 1991. The ministry supervised design bureaus that managed the research, development, and production of ballistic missiles as well as launch vehicles and satellites in the Soviet space program.

While Soviet rocketry organizations date back to 1921, the Ministry of General Machine-Building, upon being founded in 1955, became a dedicated department for aerospace technology. It was dissolved in 1957 but was reinstated in 1965. Various projects of the Soviet space program were developed at the ministry. It also began commercially providing launch services abroad through its Glavkosmos agency during the perestroika reforms of the late 1980s. The ministry was permanently abolished in 1991 amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Russian Space Agency, which would later become Roscosmos, was created in 1992 as its successor.

The first Soviet organization dedicated to rocket technology was the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, founded in 1921 by Nikolai Tikhomirov. The laboratory researched and developed solid-propellant rockets, which became the prototypes of missiles in the Katyusha rocket launcher, as well as liquid-propellant rockets, which became the prototypes of Soviet rockets and spacecraft. An organization with a similar purpose, the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, was founded in 1931. The two groups merged in 1933 to form the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, the responsibility of which was transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Aviation Industry in 1944.

The first rendition of the Ministry of General Machine-Building was created by a decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union on 2 April 1955 with the active participation of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. The ministry was formed to focus specifically on rocketry. Its intentionally vague name was chosen for purposes of secrecy. Major General of the Engineering and Artillery Service Pyotr Nikolaevich Goremykin [ru], who had held the post of Minister of Agricultural Engineering from June 1946 to March 1951, was appointed as Minister of General Machine-Building. The ministry was dissolved on 10 May 1957 and its functions were transferred.

The Ministry of General Machine-Building was reestablished on 2 March 1965 as a successor to the State Committee on Defense Technology [ru]. Sergey Afanasyev became Minister and Leonid Ivanovich Gusev [ru] became Deputy Minister while Vladimir Chelomey was the general designer of rocket technology. Transferred to the new ministry were factories from the defense, aviation, radio engineering, and shipbuilding industries, alongside leading design bureaus and research institutes such as the Research Institute of Machine-Building Technology (known as NITI-40 until 1966). Many of these were headed by academicians such as Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev [ru], Nikolay Pilyugin, Vladimir Barmin, Mikhail Ryazansky [ru], Viktor Makeev, and Viktor Litvinov. In 1977, the ministry received its own trade union.

On 26 February 1985, the Ministry of General Machine-Building issued an order that formed Glavkosmos. The subsidiary was originally envisioned as an executive agency to command all Soviet space activities, but in practice it functioned more as a marketing and coordinating body. Glavkosmos became the prime authority for implementing cooperative agreements with foreign bodies, with activities including commercial utilization of Soviet systems and approving foreign cosmonauts to fly aboard Soviet spacecraft.

Many subsidiaries of the Ministry of General Machine-Building served as primary organizations in the management of the Soviet space program; the ministry controlled roughly 1200 factories and employed between 1 million and 1.5 million people at its peak. However, contrary to its competitors (NASA in the United States, the European Space Agency in Western Europe, and the Ministry of Aerospace Industry in China), which had their programs run under single coordinating agencies, the executive architecture of the Soviet space program was multi-centered; several internally competing design bureaus, technical councils, ministry staffs, and expert commissions all held more influence over the program than political leadership. The creation of a central agency after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and establishment of the Russian Federation was therefore a new development. The Ministry of General Machine-Building was dissolved on 1 December 1991 on the basis of a 14 November resolution of the State Council of the Soviet Union. The Russian Space Agency, which eventually would become Roscosmos, was formed as its successor on 25 February 1992 by a decree of President Boris Yeltsin. Yuri Koptev, who previously had worked with designing Mars landers at NPO Lavochkin, became the first director of the agency.

In 2013, when the Russian space sector was being reorganized, one option considered was the creation of a ministry similar to the Ministry of General Machine-Building.