Sergei Korolev

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was born on December 30, 1906 in Zhytomyr, a provincial town in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Ukraine ^[1]. His parents separated when he was young, and he spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in Nizhyn before moving with his mother and stepfather to Odessa. The stepfather, an engineer, encouraged the boy's technical interests, and the seaplanes based near Odessa harbor gave those interests a direction ^[2].

As a teenager Korolev joined a local aviation society, designed a glider of his own, and learned to fly. He studied at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute before transferring in 1926 to the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School, the leading engineering academy in the Soviet Union ^[1]. There he came under the influence of Andrei Tupolev, the aircraft designer who supervised his diploma project, a light airplane that Korolev designed and flew himself ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Sergei Korolev in 1930 would have heard of a promising young aircraft engineer and glider pilot, not a rocket man. The turn came through the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the schoolteacher whose equations described how rockets could reach space, and through a circle of Moscow enthusiasts determined to test those ideas with real hardware ^[3].

In 1931 Korolev helped organize GIRD, the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, a small Moscow collective that built and flew some of the first Soviet liquid-fueled rockets ^[3]. Their early vehicles rose only a few hundred meters, but the flights caught the attention of the military. In 1933 GIRD merged with a Leningrad laboratory to form the Reaction Propulsion Scientific Research Institute, RNII, where Korolev became a deputy director and later led work on rocket-propelled gliders and cruise missiles ^[1].

The purges of the late 1930s nearly ended his life. Arrested in June 1938 on fabricated charges of sabotage, Korolev was beaten during interrogation, sentenced to ten years, and shipped to the Kolyma gold mines in the far east of Siberia, one of the deadliest corners of the Gulag ^[4]. He lost his teeth to scurvy and his jaw was broken, injuries that would matter decades later. After several months he was recalled to Moscow and moved into a sharashka, a prison design bureau where convicted engineers worked under guard. He served in Tupolev's prison bureau on bomber design, then in another that developed rocket boosters for aircraft ^[4].

Released in 1944 and formally sent to Germany in 1945 as a Red Army colonel, Korolev studied the remains of the German V-2 ballistic missile program ^[1]. In 1946 the Soviet government created a new missile design bureau, later known as OKB-1, and named Korolev its chief designer. He was thirty-nine, a former prisoner now entrusted with the most sensitive weapons project in the country ^[5].

The list of Sergei Korolev achievements begins with the R-7 Semyorka, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, which flew successfully in August 1957 ^[5]. The R-7 was designed to carry a heavy thermonuclear warhead across continents, and that requirement gave it enough lifting power for a very different cargo. On October 4, 1957 a modified R-7 placed Sputnik 1, a polished metal sphere weighing 83.6 kilograms, into orbit around the Earth ^[1]. The beeping satellite stunned the United States and made the space race a central front of the Cold War.

Korolev pressed his advantage. Sputnik 2 carried the dog Laika into orbit within a month. Luna 2 struck the Moon in September 1959, the first human artifact to reach another world, and Luna 3 photographed the Moon's hidden far side weeks later ^[3]. Then came the achievement that fixed his bureau's place in history: on April 12, 1961, the Vostok spacecraft carried Yuri Gagarin once around the Earth, making him the first human in space ^[1]. Korolev's team followed with the first daylong flight, the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova in 1963), the first multi-person crew aboard Voskhod 1 in 1964, and the first spacewalk, by Alexei Leonov, in March 1965 ^[5].

Through all of it Korolev remained officially anonymous. Soviet propaganda credited the triumphs to an unnamed Chief Designer of Rocket-Space Systems, and his name was withheld from the press for fear of foreign assassination and to preserve secrecy around the missile program ^[4]. When the Nobel committee reportedly sought the identity of Sputnik's creator, the Soviet leadership answered that the achievement belonged to the entire Soviet people ^[6].

Korolev married twice. His first wife, Xenia Vincentini, was a physician he had known since their school years in Odessa; they married in 1931 and had a daughter, Natalia, born in 1935 ^[2]. The marriage did not survive his arrest and the long separations that followed, and the couple divorced in 1949. That year he married Nina Kotenkova, a translator at his design bureau, who remained his wife until his death ^[4].

Colleagues described a driven, demanding, and occasionally volcanic manager who worked punishing hours and expected the same of others, yet who also protected his engineers and remembered his own years as a prisoner ^[5]. The Gulag left permanent marks: a damaged jaw, a weakened heart, and by some accounts a habit of keeping bread crusts, a survivor's reflex. He was formally rehabilitated in 1957, the same year his rocket launched Sputnik ^[4].

The early 1960s brought heavier burdens. Korolev directed work on the Soyuz spacecraft, on early communications and reconnaissance satellites, and on the giant N1 Moon rocket intended to answer the American Apollo program ^[5]. He fought constant battles for funding and against rival designers, above all Vladimir Chelomei, whose competing bureaus fragmented the Soviet lunar effort. A feud with the engine designer Valentin Glushko, whose engines Korolev refused for the N1, deprived the Moon rocket of the country's most experienced propulsion team ^[3].

His health was failing. Years of overwork on top of Kolyma had left him with heart trouble, gallbladder disease, and internal bleeding. In January 1966 he entered a Moscow hospital for what was described as routine intestinal surgery. The operation, performed by the Soviet health minister himself, uncovered a large tumor, and complications followed on the table. Doctors could not insert a breathing tube properly, an old difficulty tied to the jaw injury from his interrogation, and Sergei Korolev died on January 14, 1966 at the age of 59 ^[4].

Only then did the Soviet state reveal his name. Pravda published an obituary with his photograph and full biography, and he was given a state funeral, his ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall on Red Square ^[1].

Korolev's death removed the one figure with the authority to hold the Soviet lunar program together. The N1 rocket failed in all four of its test launches between 1969 and 1972, and the program was cancelled after American astronauts had walked on the Moon ^[5]. Yet the machines he left behind proved remarkably durable. Descendants of the R-7 still launch Soyuz spacecraft today, and the Soyuz vehicle his bureau designed carried crews to the International Space Station for decades, including every crew for nearly a decade after the American shuttle retired in 2011 ^[6].

His name is now everywhere he once could not be mentioned. The city of Korolyov near Moscow, home of the RSC Energia corporation that grew out of OKB-1, was renamed for him in 1996 ^[6]. A large lunar crater on the far side of the Moon, first photographed by his own Luna 3, bears his name, as does the plain where China's Chang'e 4 lander touched down. Any collection of Sergei Korolev facts circles back to a single theme: a man broken by his own state went on to give that state, and humanity, its first steps off the planet ^[3].

Historians rank him with Wernher von Braun as one of the two engineers who defined the first space age, though the two never met and Korolev worked without the public fame his American rival enjoyed ^[5]. For readers of any Sergei Korolev biography, the contrast is the point. Von Braun became a celebrity; Korolev remained a secret, and the secret built Sputnik, Vostok, and the road to orbit that others still travel.