Sergei Korolev

Ukrainian aeronautical engineer

• Born: January 12, 1907
• Birthplace: Zhitomir, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine)
• Died: January 14, 1966
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Korolev, known as the chief designer of rocket-cosmic systems in the Soviet Union, was the founder of the Soviet space program of the 1950’s and 1960’s. He designed the rocket boosters, the first unpiloted Sputnik satellites, and the piloted Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz spacecraft.

Early Life

Much of the information about Sergei Korolev (syehr-GYAY KEHR-ehl-ehv) is speculative and, in many cases, apocryphal. Korolev’s name was not released to Western authorities until years after his death in 1966. To all but those directly involved in the Soviet space program, he was known simply as the “chief designer of rocket-cosmic systems,” the title given to him by Nikita S. Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party and the leader of the Soviet Union during the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

Korolev was born in the Ukrainian town of Zhitomir to Pavel and Maria Korolev. Unfortunately, the Korolevs’ marriage soon failed, and Maria decided to take the young child to stay with her parents while she returned to school in Kiev. It is believed that Korolev stayed with his grandparents (where his mother visited often) until the age of sixteen, when his mother married an engineer, Grigori M. Balanin. Balanin moved his new family to the city of Odessa on the Black Sea.

Korolev is known to have been an intelligent child with an intense interest in aeronautics and flight. While still a teenager in the Odessa First Construction School, where he studied roofing, Korolev built his first gliders and received his introduction to the principles of aeronautics. This interest led him to the prestigious Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow in 1926. It was during this period that Korolev came in contact with some of the pioneers of Russian aeronautics and rocketry who would influence his own life’s work. At the Bauman Technical School, Korolev met Andrei Tupolev, the famous Russian aircraft designer (for whom he would later work), and built his first experimental rocket-powered glider, a forerunner to the jet-propelled aircraft. Later, at the age of twenty-five, Korolev met the founder of modern astronautics, the Russian schoolteacher turned rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

In 1931, Korolev joined with Friedrich A. Tsander, also a pioneer in Soviet rocketry, to form the Moscow Group for the Study of Reactive Propulsion. This group, which later, after several incarnations, is believed to have become the Jet Scientific Research Institute, experimented with liquid-fueled rockets and jet aircraft through the mid-1930’s. It was also during the mid-1930’s that he married his first wife, Xenia Vincentini. In 1935, Korolev’s daughter was born. Reputedly, Xenia denounced Korolev when he was later placed in prison. On gaining his freedom, Korolev divorced his first wife and married Nina Kotenkova in 1947.

Events in Korolev’s life are sketchy from about 1937 until his reappearance as the chief designer of the Soviet space effort. It is known, however, that for at least a portion of this time, and possibly on two separate occasions, he was arrested during Joseph Stalin’s purges of the country’s intelligentsia and placed in a gulag, or Soviet prison. While in the gulag, where he suffered considerable torture and degradation, Korolev was put to work with Tupolev and other scientists designing and building Soviet aircraft for World War II.

Life’s Work

Korolev’s life’s work was rocketry and the pursuit of the dream of spaceflight. It can be said that, even while researching, designing, and testing jet- and rocket-propelled aircraft, he pursued this goal through the many stages of his existence until finally achieving it with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.

In 1946, while still in prison, as part of a special work group of scientists, Korolev was sent to Germany as part of a team to recover V-1 and V-2 rockets, as well as several of the former Nazi scientists and engineers who built them. These German scientists were brought back to the Soviet Union and pressed into service as part of the fledgling Soviet missile-research program. As in the United States in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Soviet advances in rocketry were made to develop missiles that would be able to deliver nuclear weapons over great distances, what would later be called intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Korolev (after his second arrest in 1947) quickly rose to a leadership position in this effort.

Korolev’s increasing value to the Soviet military gained for him more freedom and respect as the Soviet missile program progressed. Once, during this period, he is even said to have conducted a personal briefing of Stalin himself on the missile efforts. In 1947, the Soviets, under Korolev’s leadership, successfully launched their first ballistic missile. It was not until 1953, after Stalin’s death, that Korolev was released from the gulag and offered full membership in the Communist Party. That same year, he was selected as a corresponding or associate member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the most elite and influential scientific body in the Soviet Union (in 1958, after Sputnik, he was elected to full membership in the academy; at the time only 150 or so scientists in the Soviet Union were so honored). It was also at this time that the new Soviet leadership, under the direction of Khrushchev, officially endorsed and committed substantial funds to the development of Korolev’s missiles.

In 1955, Korolev supervised the construction of what would later become the Baikonur Cosmodrome near the village of Tyuratam in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. By early 1957, he had conducted the first unsuccessful tests of the R-7 rocket. (The Soviets and the United States use different designations for the same Soviet rockets. In the West, this was called the SS-6, or Sapwood rocket.) As part of the International Geophysical Year (a period running from 1957 through 1958 in which several nations committed to making significant scientific advances), the Soviet Union and the United States both announced intentions to place satellites in orbit around Earth. Korolev, because of his work with the Soviet missile program, was given operational control of the fledgling space effort. Overall authority was under Field Marshall Mitrofan Nedelin, commander of the Soviet military Strategic Rocket Forces.

In 1956 and early 1957, Korolev’s missile program is said to have experienced numerous launch failures similar to those that occurred in the United States at the same time. Because the Soviet Union was a closed society and this was a classified program, however, the Western world knew little of the progress of the Soviet effort. Finally, after announcing to the world the frequency at which its radio would transmit after launch, Sputnik 1 (which is the Russian word for “satellite”) was placed into orbit on October 4, 1957. The 80-kilogram metal sphere contained a radio transmitter, four antennae, and simple electronic equipment, but its appearance shocked the world.

After Sputnik, when Khrushchev saw how deeply the event affected the Westerners, he personally assumed control over Korolev’s program. The scientist could undertake no launch or research effort without first receiving the approval of the Soviet leader. Khrushchev’s interest in space research, however, was dictated more by his desire for propaganda successes in the West than by an understanding of the value of space research. Because of this limitation, Korolev was not allowed to conduct the kind of redundant tests that usually occur in an experimental program. He was instead pressured to make new inroads with each launch, and his launches were timed to accommodate the Soviet leader’s political agenda. This was especially evident with the launching of Sputnik 2, a larger satellite that contained the first living being placed in space, a dog named Laika. The Soviet program had not yet developed a reentry capability, so Laika died in orbit after a week in space.

Two of Korolev’s goals in the early days of the Soviet space effort were to send a satellite to the moon and to launch a man into space and, again, eventually place him on the moon. This would fulfill one of the boldest predictions of his idol, Tsiolkovsky, about the potential for rocket travel beyond Earth. Again after several failed efforts, Korolev succeeded in the launching of Luna 2 in September, 1959. Luna 2 became the first human-made object to come into contact with another celestial body when it crashed into the moon at the Sea of Tranquillity. Luna 3, which followed soon after, orbited the moon and took the first pictures of that body’s dark side, the side that is not visible to Earth.

The launch vehicles Korolev designed and built were far more powerful than their American counterparts because of the inability of Soviet industry to miniaturize the warheads for their ICBMs, hence the need to carry larger, heavier payloads. This heavier lift capability gave Korolev the hardware he would need to place a human into Earth orbit. Khrushchev, realizing the potential propaganda value of putting men into space, supported Korolev’s effort enthusiastically. On March 14, 1960, the first group of twenty cosmonauts began training for the Vostok spaceflights.

Korolev actually held three jobs in the Soviet program. He was chief designer of rocket-cosmic systems, head of the teams that built the spacecraft and launch vehicles, and director of launch operations at the launch pad. He even had constructed near the launch facility a small cottage for his own use so that he could sleep near his rockets and work longer hours.

In October of 1960, Korolev narrowly escaped death after the worst disaster in the history of space exploration, the explosion of a rocket on the launch pad (several Western experts believe that the rocket carried an unpiloted probe bound for Mars) that took the lives of dozens of Soviet space scientists and engineers. To meet Khrushchev’s demand for continued propaganda success, Korolev began test-launching spacecraft called “Korbul-Sputniks.” These vehicles were unpiloted versions of the Vostok capsules that would carry humans into Earth orbit. On April 12, 1961, Vostok 1, with Yuri Gagarin on board, circled Earth once, opening space to humans. Korolev had achieved his dream.

The remaining five Vostok missions for which Korolev received approval were longer in duration but dictated in content by political considerations. Korolev, for example, was forced to send a woman, parachutist Valentina Tereshkova, into space on Vostok 6 before he could fly Vostoks 3 and 4 to conduct the first rendezvous attempts in orbit.

Further pressure came when the Americans announced Project Gemini, a two-person program to develop many of the techniques that would be necessary on lunar landing missions. To outdo the Americans, Khrushchev ordered Korolev to launch three men into space before Gemini could begin. Voskhod, an upgraded version of the Vostok capsule, was created, and two missions were flown, in 1964 and 1965. Voskhod 1 was piloted by three cosmonauts. In reaction to the announced intention of the Americans to attempt an extravehicular activity, or space walk, Voskhod 2, featured a space walk by Alexei Leonov. Other planned Voskhod missions were canceled when Khrushchev was deposed and replaced by new leadership in the Kremlin.

During the Voskhod period, Korolev was occupied with the development of the Soyuz spacecraft, the craft that would be the centerpiece of the Soviet lunar landing program. He was also concerned with the creation of a large launch vehicle called the Proton. His efforts were cut short, however, by his untimely death at the age of fifty-nine on January 14, 1966, the result of improperly executed surgery in Moscow. His body was cremated and given a hero’s burial in the Kremlin wall.

Significance

Few, if any, efforts are so identified with the twentieth century’s technological revolution as is humankind’s movement into space. Korolev was one of the first and most important pioneers in that effort. Although unknown to most of those he affected, he was, indeed, one of the most influential figures in the latter half of the twentieth century. The space age he helped create reshaped the mind and imagination of a generation and set his nation and the world on a new course in human history. Korolev’s leadership in his country’s space program, as well as the influence his success had on American space efforts, helped advance computer science, engineering, electronics, communications technology, and numerous other disciplines. In many ways, he was a spark that ignited a bonfire of discovery in his time.

He is said to have been a compelling figure to those with whom he worked. The space program certainly suffered with his loss. Two of the missions that followed shortly after his death ended in the deaths of four of his cosmonauts, and the moon landings he envisioned were canceled altogether after the American success of Apollo 11. The Soviet space program, which continued to move steadily and well, would lack the clear vision and purpose it once had under Korolev’s leadership.

Bibliography

Chertock, Boris E. Rockets and People. Edited by Asif A. Siddiqi. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005-2006. An English translation of Chertock’s book about his experiences working on Soviet spacecraft, including how he met and worked with Korolev.

Clark, Phillip. The Soviet Manned Space Program: An Illustrated History of the Men, the Missions, and the Spacecraft. New York: Orion Books, 1988. Clark is one of the acknowledged Western experts on the Soviet space program, and this is one of the most comprehensive books on the subject.

Daniloff, Nicholas. The Kremlin and the Cosmos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. This book, by a noted American journalist, gives an insightful look at the early days of the Soviet space program. For its time, it was a landmark effort and is still worthy of note. A seminal work.

Furniss, Tim. Manned Spaceflight Log. Rev. ed. London: Jane’s, 1986. A concise, fact-filled listing of the primary mission objectives and results from all piloted spaceflight up to Soyuz T-15, this book provides a broad overview of the progress made in space exploration. One of the best books for the beginning space enthusiast.

McAleer, Neil. The Omni Space Almanac: A Complete Guide to the Space Age. New York: World Almanac, 1987. A compendium of information about the major developments of the space age, with emphasis on the later years and their import for the future.

Oberg, James E. Red Star in Orbit: The Inside Story of Soviet Failures and Triumphs in Space. New York: Random House, 1981. Oberg is one of the West’s leading experts on the Soviet space program. In this, his most famous book, he carefully details the development of the cosmonauts’ march to space in an entertaining and informative format. A must for beginning students.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost. New York: Random House, 1988. Two chapters in this book are dedicated to examining the secretive nature of the Soviet space program and debunking the rumors that have sprung up in the West over supposed space tragedies. Again, Oberg opens the door to the layperson with concise, interesting descriptions and fast-paced storytelling.

Penkovskiy, Oleg. The Penkovskiy Papers. Translated by Peter Deriabin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. This work, reported to be the memoirs of one of the most important Western spies ever to operate in the Soviet Union, discusses many aspects of the Soviet system, including the earliest formulation of the missile and space programs.

Siddiqi, Asif A. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. An award-winning book that offers a comprehensive and detailed history of the Soviet space program. An essential resource.