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Sergey Pavlovich Korolev

S.P. Korolev was born on 12 January 1907 in Zhitomir, in northern Ukraine. How Korolev came to Odessa in the Southern Ukraine is not clear, but while there he entered the Odessa Building Trades School. At the age of 19 he designed, build and flew his own glider. His education at the Kiev Polytehnic Institute, and in 1926 he went to study aeronautical engineering at the Moscow Higher Technical School, where his teachers included Zhukovsku and Tupolev. There he joined a group of young rocket enthusiasts. Korolev became Chief Designer of this group, and 1933, at a site 20 miles from Moscow, they launched their first rockets, using liquid fuel. From very modest beginning they began to develop rockets which reached 2.000 mph. These feats soon began to interest the military, but they had no interest in romantic trips into Space: the military wanted military rocked and rocked-powered aircraft. Korolev’s sponsor was marshal Mikhail N. Tkhachevsky, who in 1938 fell victim to one of stalin’s purges. Korolevwas arrested on 6 june 1938 and sentenced to years in a labour camp and sent to the gold mines at Kolyma in Eastern Siberia.

As war came, the prison camps were scoured for anyone who could make a significant contribution to the Soviet war effort, and that of course included aeronautical engineers and rocket scientists. Instrumental in rescuing Korolev was his old tutor Tupolev, who was himself a prisoner and had already been taken into a prison design bureau. So Korolev was also taken in that bureau.

In 1947 Korolev was put in charge of all Soviet rocket development. The onset of the Cold War gave a further boost to rocket development. From its bases in Europe and the Near East, the USA could send nuclear bombers over the Soviet Union without fear of direct retaliation: at that time the USSR had no bomber capable of making the return trip over the USA. There was the need to design a rocket capable of doing that. A new launch site was constructed at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, beyond the range of Western radar.

In 1954 Korolev submitted a secret memo to the Government raising the prospect of launching a satellite into space. On 4 October 1957 the small sphere which very soon became known as Sputnik (“satellite”) went up to make the first of 90 orbits, circling the Earth 16 times a day, its radio transmitter emitting a bleep that was heard everywhere. Sputnik was visible in the night sky above Amsterdam, New York, Peking and, most importantly, Moscow. Its huge impact in terms of publicity brought prestige and glory to the Soviet Union – but not to Korolev. Khrushchev insisted that the Nobel Prize which followed was accepted on behalf of the Soviet People.

The success of Sputnik opened the door of opportunity to the Chief Designer. Just over a year later he was able to send up a modified Sputnik: on 3 November 1957 the dog Laika became the first living thing to go into space. And the Chief Designer was already planning Vostok, a rocket capable of putting a man into space for ten days, with enough room in the capsule for the cosmonaut to move around. There remained the problem of choosing the man. Korolev’s requirements were simple: a small man of 75 kilos. The rest was left to a selection committee. The committee chose Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin went up in Vostok-1 on 12 April 1961, making one orbit of the Earth in a flight lasting 108 minutes.

Meanwhile the programme of manned orbits went ahead, and by Summer 1963 there had been four manned flights. At this point Khrushchev decided he wanted another publicity coup. Korolev provided it in the form of Valentina Tereshkova.Tereshkova went up in Vostok-6 on 16 June 1963 and became the first woman in space.by the end of her flight she had orbited the Earth 48 times and had spent more hours in space than all the USAs astronauts put together. As a practical flight,however, it disappointed Korolev: Tereshkova had fallen asleep for some time and had not completed all the tasks set her.The next coup followed quikly:on 18 March 1965, cosmonauts Belyayev and Leonov were launched in Voskhold 2 for a 17-orbit flight, during which Leonov made the first spase walk. But it was yet another record for the Soviet space programme: this was the Soyuz rocet. Soyuz was to become the most-used rocet in the world and Korolev’s abiding memorial.

In Winter of 1965/66 he went into hospital for what should have been a routine operation. It went wrong. Presambly septicaemia set in, and Korolev died on 14^th January 1966. Only now was he publicly asknowledged, begin awarded a burial in the Kremlin wall, as a hero of the Soviet Union. And on 31 st January came the launch of Luna 9, the first space vehicle to make a successful soft landing on the Moon. It looked as though Korolev’s achievements would continue to keep the Soviet Union ahead.