Korolev's deputy who designed the brains of Sputnik and then wrote the history of the Soviet space program
On May 2, 1945, Major Boris Chertok scrawled his name on the walls of the fallen Reichstag — the moment he would forever call 'the happiest achievement of my life.' Three months later he was knee-deep in V-2 wreckage, opening the first page of the Soviet space program.
Korolev's closest deputy, he designed the guidance and control systems that steered Soviet rocketry for half a century — from the R-7 ICBM through Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz, and Mir. A Hero of Socialist Labor (1961) and full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he published his four-volume memoir 'Rockets and People,' the definitive insider history of the Soviet space program, and kept writing until age 99.
Career Timeline
- 1930–38Electrician, then aircraft special-equipment designer at Plant No. 22
- 1940–45Electrical and radio equipment engineer at Bolkhovitinov OKB
- 1945–47Germany mission: studied V-2 guidance; Institute Rabe and Institut Nordhausen
- 1946–56Head of control systems at NII-88; began work under Korolev
- 1956–74Deputy chief designer at OKB-1: control systems for R-7, Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz
- 1974–92Deputy general designer at NPO Energia: Mir station, Energia rocket controls
- 1994–99Published four-volume memoir 'Rockets and People'; NASA English edition 2005–11
- 2000Elected full member (academician) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
Half a Century with Korolev: Inside the Soviet Space Program
Chertok first met Sergei Korolev in 1945 at Nordhausen, Germany, amid the wreckage of the V-2 program. That encounter between two engineers scouring Nazi rocket debris became the starting point of the Soviet space age. Korolev immediately recognized Chertok's expertise in control systems and brought him into NII-88; from then until Korolev's death in 1966, Chertok remained his most trusted deputy designer. The R-7 ICBM's guidance system, Sputnik's radio transmitter, the Vostok spacecraft's autonomous landing sequence — all passed through Chertok's hands. In retirement, his four-volume memoir 'Rockets and People' reconstructed this world from the inside: Korolev's charisma and ruthlessness, the silence that fell over the design bureau after a failed launch, the wounds left by losing the Moon race. Chertok recorded the intimate human drama of a program hidden behind Cold War triumphalism. In his 2002 address to the Korolev Readings, 'Our Cosmonautics — Triumph and Drama,' he reflected: 'We won in space, but on Earth we lost much.' NASA translated and published his memoirs not as the story of a defeated rival, but as the honest testimony of a scientist who witnessed the birth of the space age from within.