Sergei Pavlovich Korolev

Sergei Korolev belonged to the pioneer generation that began rocket development in 1931 at the Moscow Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD). In August 1933 GIRD launched GIRD-09, the first Soviet rocket of the liquid-fuel family, and at the consolidated Reactive Scientific Research Institute (RNII) formed that year Korolev served as deputy director, designing winged craft and rocket gliders. Before turning thirty he was already one of the central figures of Soviet rocketry.

The Great Terror did not spare the institute. After director Kleimenov and Langemak were executed and Valentin Glushko arrested, Korolev too was arrested on June 27, 1938, charged with membership in a counter-revolutionary organization. Under beatings he confessed to the fabricated charges, was sentenced to ten years, and was sent to the Maldyak gold mine in Kolyma, where scurvy cost him his teeth and brought him to the edge of death. This archive records this plainly: Korolev's arrest was groundless, an emblematic case of the losses the Terror inflicted on Soviet science.

In 1939 a review of his case was ordered and he was recalled from Kolyma; his sentence was reduced to eight years, to be served in TsKB-29, the prison design bureau led by Tupolev, the so-called sharashka. There he worked on the Tu-2 bomber, moved in 1942 to a rocket-engine bureau in Kazan where he worked with Glushko again, and was released in July 1944. Full rehabilitation came only in 1957. He rarely spoke publicly of those years, but he never once put down the work.

After the war Korolev became chief designer of long-range missiles at the NII-88 institute, moving from copies of the German A-4 to original designs. In August 1957 the R-7, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, flew successfully, and he persuaded the government to put a satellite where its warhead would sit. On October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 reached orbit: the Earth's first artificial satellite, launched by a socialist state, on a design by a man who twenty years earlier had been a prisoner in a gold mine.

While he lived, his name was a state secret. The newspapers called him only "the Chief Designer", and when the Nobel committee asked who had designed Sputnik, Khrushchev is said to have answered: the entire Soviet people. From that anonymity he wrote the opening chapters of the space age one after another: the first satellite carrying a living creature, probes toward the Moon and Venus, and on April 12, 1961, Gagarin's Vostok 1. Colleagues remembered him as a locomotive pulling the whole design bureau alone, a man of volcanic temper who carried the quiet scars of his prisoner years.

On January 14, 1966, Korolev died during surgery to remove a tumor; a body weakened by Kolyma did not survive the operation. Two days later Pravda carried a full obituary, and the Soviet people and the world learned at last that the Chief Designer's name was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. His ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall. The name of the man who opened the space age in obscurity was revealed with his death, and became the emblem of the entire Soviet space program.