Sergei Korolev

• 1. Introduction

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  Sergei Korolev stepped out of a black ZIS 110 limousine with his coat collar turned up and his hat brim pulled low. The cosmonaut Alexei Leonov watched from a window and could not make out the visitor's face. He saw only a man a little taller than average, with a short neck and a large head. Moments later the stranger strode into the room where the trainees waited and said, "Sit down, my little eagles." He then glanced down a list of names. One by one, in alphabetical order, he had each man stand and talk briefly about his flying career.

  That entrance belonged to the engineer who stood behind the Soviet space program. How did a man once branded a criminal come to command it? Who stood beside him, and who worked to undermine him? And why did the country he served keep his name from the world for so long?

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• 2. Gliders and Rockets

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  In Zhytomyr, then the capital of the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire, Korolev was born to a teacher of Russian named Pavel Yakovlevich Korolev and his wife Maria Nikolaevna. Three years later money troubles split the couple. Maria told her son that his father had died. Sergei never saw Pavel again, and Pavel himself died in 1929, before the boy learned the truth.

  In Nizhyn, his maternal grandparents raised him, and his mother was often away in Kiev attending higher courses for women. The boy grew up lonely, with few friends, and adults noted him as stubborn, persistent and argumentative. He taught himself to read from his grandfather's newspapers. His pre-school teacher marveled at his memory and his gift for mathematics. In 1916 his mother married Grigory Balanin, an electrical engineer, who proved an excellent stepfather and shaped the boy's manners and study habits. The family moved to Odessa in 1917. There the aftermath of the Russian Revolution closed the schools, and Korolev studied at home. He caught typhus during the food shortages of 1919.

  A 1913 air show had already lit his interest in flight. In Odessa he trained in carpentry at the Odessa Building Trades School, worked at the local glider club and watched the military seaplanes stationed nearby. In 1923 he joined the aviation society OAVUK, and a year later, at 17, he designed a glider called the K-5. At the Kiev Polytechnic Institute he met a classmate, Xenia Vincentini, whom he would later marry. In 1925 he broke two ribs flying a training glider his class had built. In July 1926 he entered the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, where the celebrated aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev taught and became his mentor. The Communist Party sped up the training of engineers in 1929, and Korolev earned his diploma with a practical aircraft design.

  Rockets entered the picture in 1930. While serving as a lead engineer on the Tupolev TB-3 heavy bomber at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, he earned a pilot's license. He began to wonder what lay above the altitude limit of the planes he flew. He married Xenia on the 6th of August 1931, seven years after he first proposed. That same year he and the space travel enthusiast Friedrich Zander helped create the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, known as GIRD. There he met Mikhail Tikhonravov, who would later work on the Sputnik team. Korolev became head of the group in May 1932. On the 18th of August 1933 GIRD launched the GIRD-09, a hybrid-propellant rocket, and on the 25th of November it flew the GIRD-X, the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket.

  Military interest then merged GIRD with a Leningrad laboratory to form the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, or RNII. It gathered Korolev, Georgy Langemak and the engine designer Valentin Glushko under one roof. Korolev started as deputy to Ivan Kleymyonov, but a dispute over the institute's direction led to his demotion in 1934, and Langemak took his place. He moved to winged missiles and a crewed rocket-powered glider, and published "Rocket Flight in Stratosphere" that year. His daughter Natalya was born on the 10th of April 1935, and the family took its own apartment in 1936, two years before his arrest.

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• 3. Lubyanka and Kolyma

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  In November 1937 the NKVD arrested RNII's director Kleymyonov and its chief engineer Langemak. They were tortured, made to sign false confessions and executed in January 1938. Glushko was arrested in March 1938 and sent to the Gulag with many other leading engineers. Korolev was seized on the 27th of June 1938. The accusations against him included false statements extracted from Kleymyonov, Langemak and Glushko. Interrogators tortured him in the Lubyanka prison. Glushko and Korolev had reportedly both been denounced by Andrei Kostikov, who took over RNII after its leaders vanished.

  From his cell Korolev wrote appeal after appeal to the authorities, Stalin among them. When Nikolai Yezhov fell, the new NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria agreed to retry him on reduced charges in 1939. By then Korolev was already traveling toward Kolyma, in the far east of Siberia, where he spent several months in a gold mine before word of the retrial reached him. In camps like that one, bad food, poor shelter and thin clothing killed thousands of prisoners every month. Korolev was injured, possibly suffered a heart attack and lost most of his teeth to scurvy. He came back to Moscow in late 1939, and his sentence was cut to eight years.

  Tupolev, his old mentor, then stepped in. In September 1940 Korolev was moved to a prison for scientists and engineers, a sharashka known as Central Design Bureau 29. There prisoners worked on projects assigned by the party leadership. During the war that bureau designed the Tu-2 bomber and the Pe-2 dive bomber, and it relocated several times, first to stay clear of the advancing Germans. In 1942 Korolev was transferred to the Kazan sharashka OKB-16, which was led by Glushko. The two designed the RD-1 KhZ auxiliary rocket motor, tested in a Lavochkin La-7R fighter in a fast-climb trial that failed. A special government decree finally released Korolev, Tupolev, Glushko and others on the 27th of June 1944. Korolev had been cut off from his family until then.

  Korolev seldom spoke about the camps. He lived in fear of being shot because of the military secrets he carried, and prison left him reserved and cautious. He later discovered that Glushko had been among his accusers, which probably fed a lifelong enmity between them. For another year he stayed at the bureau, serving as Glushko's deputy and studying rocket designs. Not until 1957 would the state drop the charges against him.

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• 4. Copying the V-2

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  In 1945 Korolev was commissioned as a colonel in the Red Army, and his first decoration, the Badge of Honor, came that year for his work on rocket motors for military aircraft. On the 8th of September 1945 he was sent to Germany with other experts to recover the technology of the V-2 rocket. In February 1946 the Soviets set up the Institute Nordhausen. Korolev served as chief engineer and Glushko ran engine assembly and propulsion. Helmut Gröttrup, who had worked with Wernher von Braun, was general director. By late 1946 more than 2,000 German scientists and engineers had been shipped to the USSR under Operation Osoaviakhim. Von Braun himself had surrendered to the Americans.

  Stalin signed a decree on the 13th of May 1946 that made rocketry a national priority and created a new institute, NII-88, outside Moscow. Dmitriy Ustinov took military control, and he named Korolev chief designer of long-range missiles in Department No. 3. Korolev proved a gifted organizer. He assembled a Council of Chief Designers that helped the missile industry get around its bureaucratic hierarchy, and the council later took engineering control of the early space program.

  Back from Germany in February 1947, Korolev was first told to reproduce the V-2. The Soviets could assemble only about a dozen from captured parts, so leaders decided to build their own version, the R-1. Korolev objected, because he wanted to jump straight to the more advanced R-2, but he was overruled. More than 170 German specialists joined NII-88. About half worked at a branch on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger, some 200 kilometers from Moscow. In October 1947 at Kapustin Yar, the Soviets fired 11 V-2 rockets, and 5 reached their targets. R-1 tests followed in September 1948, with 9 launches that autumn and no Germans present.

  Korolev pressed for the R-2, meeting Stalin about it in April 1947. A German counterproposal called the G-1 had early backing from Soviet management. Korolev disliked using the Germans for personal reasons and largely ignored their advice. Security worries also barred them from any Soviet missile design, and the G-1 was ended in December 1948. The German team was dissolved in 1950, and its members went home between December 1951 and November 1953.

  The R-2 doubled the V-2's range and was the first design with a separable warhead. The R-3 was meant to cover 3,000 kilometers, far enough to hit England, but Glushko could not get enough thrust from its engines, and it was cancelled in 1952. That year Korolev joined the Communist Party to win funding for later projects such as the R-5, a more modest 1,200-kilometer missile that flew successfully by 1953.

  Then came the R-7 Semyorka, the first true intercontinental ballistic missile. This two-stage rocket could lift 5.4 tons, enough to carry the Soviets' bulky nuclear bomb 7,000 kilometers. Its first three launches in the summer of 1957 all failed, which demoralized Korolev and his team and put his position and satellite dream at risk. The fourth, on the 21st of August 1957, delivered a dummy payload to the Kamchatka Peninsula. The news agency TASS reported it briefly, and American audiences largely brushed it aside. The R-7 would suffer later failures, since it was never meant to be a practical weapon. Its real destiny lay on a launch pad of a different kind.

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• 5. Sputnik

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  On the 26th of May 1954, six days after being put in charge of the R-7, Korolev submitted a proposal to use it to launch a satellite. He cited a technical report from Tikhonravov and noted that Americans were studying similar ideas. Soviet leaders gave only lukewarm support. So Korolev started a small research project with Tikhonravov and, with like-minded engineers, wrote speculative newspaper articles on space flight to build pressure. American newspapers and the CIA noticed them, which nudged Washington toward its own satellite effort.

  On the 29th of July 1955 the Eisenhower administration announced plans for "small Earth-circling satellites" for the International Geophysical Year. Korolev seized on the news. On the 5th of August he sent a new proposal, with American press clippings attached, arguing that launching first would bring prestige. Three days later the leadership approved his plan. After a meeting on the 30th of August, he could use the R-7 for satellites, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences backed him. The Council of Ministers formally approved the satellite on the 30th of January 1956, in decree number 149-88ss.

  The first design, nicknamed Object D, was an ambitious scientific laboratory with pressurized equipment, long-range communications and automated switches. Much of that had no precedent. By mid-1956 the project was slipping behind schedule, and Korolev feared the American Project Vanguard and a secret 1956 missile launch from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Testing then showed the R-7 engine's specific impulse would fall below the planned figure. Korolev sent a revised plan for a simpler payload of about 100 kilograms. It was approved on the 25th of January 1957 as Object PS.

  Some officials still resisted. In August 1957 Korolev proposed that the Central Committee decide, and since nobody wanted to lose the prestige to the Americans, approval came. A second successful R-7 flight in September fixed the 6th of October as the target date. Mikhail Khomyakov led the design of Object PS, with Oleg Ivanovskiy as his deputy. Tikhonravov's group built it in under a month while Korolev personally drove the assembly at a hectic pace. The result was a polished metal sphere no larger than a beach ball, with batteries powering a transmitter and four external antennas. Fearing an American preemptive launch, Korolev moved the date up by two days. On the 4th of October 1957 the sphere reached orbit as Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.

  Anonymity followed the triumph. The chief people in the program became state secrets, though they were allowed to write a report on Sputnik 1's design, which Pravda published without a byline on the 9th of October. Korolev also wrote other articles under the pen name "Professor K. Sergeyev". Moscow's first reaction was low-key, but the world's reaction was electrifying, and the Soviets later made the most of it. Nikita Khrushchev had been bored by the thought of another Korolev launch. Pleased by the acclaim, he urged a more sophisticated satellite in time for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution on the 3rd of November.

  Korolev and his close associate Mstislav Keldysh proposed putting a dog aboard, which caught the Academy of Sciences' interest. Sputnik 2 had six times the mass of Sputnik 1, and the whole craft was designed from scratch in four weeks, with no time for testing or quality checks. It launched on the 3rd of November, carrying the dog Laika. Nothing was built to bring her home, and she died of heat exhaustion after about five hours in space.

  Sputnik 3 failed on its first launch on the 27th of April 1958 when its engine malfunctioned and it fell back in pieces. It reached orbit on the 15th of May, but its tape recorder failed, so the mapping of the Van Allen radiation belts fell to the American satellites Explorer 3 and Pioneer 3. In Washington, doubts about Soviet ICBM power had mostly vanished.

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• 6. Dogs and Cosmonauts

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  The idea of sending a person into orbit had occurred to Korolev as early as 1948, but planning began in earnest in 1958 with design studies for the Vostok spacecraft. It would carry a single passenger in a space suit and fly fully automated. The suit used a mix of 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, unlike the pure oxygen system of the United States. The capsule had an escape mechanism for problems before launch and a soft-landing and ejection system for recovery. Like Sputnik, it was a sphere, and Korolev said that "the spherical shape would be more stable dynamically". He personally recruited Konstantin Feoktistov as principal designer of the crewed vehicles.

  Testing came first. On the 15th of May 1960 an uncrewed prototype completed 64 orbits, but its reentry maneuver failed. On the 28th of July 1960 an explosion killed two dogs, Chaika and Lishichka. Then on the 19th of August Belka and Strelka flew eighteen orbits on a Vostok and returned alive, a first for living creatures. In all the Soviets sent six dogs, not every flight a success.

  On the 12th of April 1961 a modified R-7 lifted Yuri Alexeevich Gagarin into orbit, ahead of Alan Shepard's flight for the United States. Korolev acted as capsule coordinator and spoke with Gagarin by radio. Gagarin ejected at an altitude of 7 kilometers and came down by parachute. More Vostok flights followed. Vostok 5 completed 81 orbits, and Vostok 6 carried Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

  On the 11th of August 1962 Korolev launched the first group flight, Vostok 3 and 4, with Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich. The two craft came within 6.5 kilometers of each other, a result of precise launch calculations rather than steering. At Korolev's request, Popovich sang a Ukrainian song, "Dyvlyus ya na nebo", which became the first song from space.

  Korolev meanwhile had grander plans, including a Soyuz craft able to dock and swap crews. Reports claim Khrushchev demanded cheap new firsts, such as a multi-person flight, and threatened to hand the work to Korolev's rival Vladimir Chelomey. But the Russian Space Web calls that demand a legend, and Challenge to Apollo says the evidence for the order does not hold up.

  Whatever the pressure, the result was Voskhod, a stripped-down version of Vostok. It had to carry more people, and a three-person crew could not eject and parachute separately, so the capsule needed much larger parachutes. Early tests failed until stronger fabric improved reliability. Korolev accepted the job on condition that he receive more backing for his N-1 rocket. On the 12th of October 1964 Komarov, Yegorov and Feoktistov flew sixteen orbits, without space suits or a launch abort system.

  On the 18th of March 1965 Voskhod 2, hurriedly fitted with an airlock, carried Alexei Leonov on the world's first spacewalk. He barely managed to get back through the airlock, and further Voskhod missions were shelved. By then Khrushchev had fallen, and Korolev, back in favor, was put in charge of beating the Americans to the Moon.

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• 7. Dreams of the Moon

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  Korolev called his lunar spacecraft Mechta, the Russian word for "dream", though officially they were the Lunas. He had been thinking about the Moon even before Sputnik 1. Only in 1958, after he wrote a letter arguing that existing technology could do it, did leaders approve. A modified R-7 got a new upper stage, whose engine was the first designed to ignite in space.

  The first three lunar probes of 1958 failed, partly because political pressure forced rushed launches on an inadequate testing budget. Korolev blamed infighting in Moscow for the lack of funds. Pressed once to beat the Americans, he reportedly exclaimed, "Do you think that only American rockets explode!?" Luna 1 flew on the 2nd of January 1959 and missed the Moon by about 6,000 kilometers. Still, it was the first probe to reach escape velocity and the first man-made object to orbit the Sun. After a launch failure, Luna 2 struck the surface on the 14th of September 1959. Luna 3, launched only two years after Sputnik 1, photographed the far side of the Moon on the 7th of October 1959, showing people a view they had never seen.

  Soft landings eluded him. Luna 4 and Luna 6 missed the Moon, and Luna 5, Luna 7 and Luna 8 crashed into it. Luna 9 achieved the first soft landing only after Korolev had died.

  He also reached for Mars and Venus. His first two Mars probes suffered engine failures, and all five Venus probes launched between 1961 and 1962 failed, with Korolev supervising every launch. On the 1st of November 1962 Mars 1 completed the first flyby of Mars, although communications broke down. The first impact on Venus, by Venera 3, and on Mars came after his death. To control these craft, a radio communication center was needed in the Crimea, near Simferopol and Yevpatoria.

  In 1961 his staff began designing the immense N1 rocket around the NK-15 liquid-fuel engine. They also worked on the Soyuz and on robotic landers, all aimed at a Moon landing that Korolev never lived to attempt.

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• 8. The Name Revealed

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  Leonov wrote that long before the cosmonauts met him, one man dominated their conversation. They referred to him only as SP, after the initials of his first two names, or as "Chief Designer", or simply "Chief". Leonov remembered him as a man of the highest integrity who was also extremely demanding, treated like a god. The public knew him only by the Russian title glavny konstruktor. The policy began under Stalin, supposedly to shield him from foreign agents, and even some cosmonauts did not know his name.

  Glushko's description of him, passed on by the émigré Leonid Vladimirov, was of a short, heavily built man with brown eyes shining with intelligence. He was a skeptic, a cynic and a pessimist. His favorite saying was "Khlopnut bez nekrologa", meaning that they would all vanish without a trace. He rarely drank and lived austerely. His marriage to Vincentini broke down around 1946 after an affair with Nina Ivanovna Kotenkova, an English interpreter at the Podlipki office. She divorced him in 1948 and he married Kotenkova in 1949, though affairs continued. He also trained young engineers, among them Arkady Ostashev, whom he hired for dissertation work before Ostashev joined the R-2 effort.

  Criticism followed him. Sergei Khrushchev, the former premier's son, argued that Korolev was a brilliant manager rather than a scientist or designer, and he said Korolev tried to adapt the N1, which was designed in 1958 with a payload of about 70 tons, rather than build in stages. Khrushchev judged the Moon effort doomed from the start. He also described a bitter rivalry between Korolev and Vladimir Chelomey, who each toppled the other's projects while never speaking ill of each other. According to him, each would have preferred an American Moon landing to the other man's triumph.

  Korolev's body gave out first. He had a first heart attack on the 3rd of December 1960, and doctors found a kidney disorder from the camps. They warned him that his pace could shorten his life. He kept going, convinced Khrushchev valued the program only as propaganda. By 1962 he had intestinal bleeding. In 1964 he was diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia, spent ten days in hospital and developed gallbladder inflammation. He also suffered hearing loss, possibly from rocket-engine tests.

  The circumstances of his death remain uncertain. He entered the hospital on the 5th of January 1966 for what was meant to be routine surgery and died nine days later, on the 14th of January. The government cited a large cancerous tumor. Glushko said a botched operation killed him. Another account says that when he began to bleed, doctors could not insert a breathing tube because his jaws, injured in the Gulag, had never healed properly. Pravda published his obituary on the 16th of January 1966 with a photograph showing all his medals, and his ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall.

  His deputy Vasily Mishin inherited the N1 program. After all four N-1 test launches failed, Mishin was fired in 1972 and replaced by Glushko. By then the Americans had reached the Moon, and Leonid Brezhnev cancelled the program.

  Honors came gradually. Korolev was twice named Hero of Socialist Labour, in 1956 and 1961, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1958. He received the Lenin Prize in 1971. Sergei Khrushchev claimed his father turned down a Nobel Prize for Korolev to avoid angering the other chief designers. The town of Podlipki became Korolev in 1996, with a large statue of him in the square. A crater on the far side of the Moon, a crater on Mars and the asteroid 1855 Korolyov carry his name, as does the Korolev cross, the visual effect of a rocket stage separating. Aeroflot named a new Boeing 777 for him in 2021.

  In the alternate-history series For All Mankind, creator Ronald D. Moore says the timeline diverges because Korolev survives his 1966 surgery and the Soviets reach the Moon first. In 2015 the band Public Service Broadcasting released a tribute song called "Korolev" as the B-side of its single "Sputnik", from the album The Race For Space.

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