Sergei Korolev
The hidden hero for the first ever human spaceflight
“Korolev and his team created the R-7 booster rocket, a pioneering rocket in space history as it was the first intercontinental ballistic missile”
Although not a household name, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was the lead rocket engineer for the Soviet Union during the intense years of the Space Race that flared during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the tenure of Korolev the Soviet Union saw spaceflight evolve greatly, with many milestones we look back on today as revolutionary.
Born on 12 January 1907 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, Korolev was fascinated by aircraft from an early age and was even designing his first glider by the age of 17. He graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and joined the Bauman Moscow State Technical University where his interests migrated towards rocket propulsion, which was only a theoretical subject at the time.
During the mid-1930s the Soviet Union was in a dark time under Joseph Stalin as the ‘Great Purge’ was underway. This movement was all about prosecuting Stalin’s perceived opponents, and Korolev’s colleague, Valentin Glushko, was taken as part of this. Glushko then turned Korolev in on 23 March 1938, who was arrested and sentenced to ten years of hard labour.
Korolev spent two years in various jails before being allowed to join an Experimental Design Bureau – a labour camp for engineers and scientists – at the request of his old mentor Andrei Tupolev.
In November 1944 Korolev was out of jail and was leading his own team that was responsible for the Soviet’s rocket equivalent of
Nazi Germany’s V2 missile. After many years of development at the drawing board Korolev and his team created the R-7 booster rocket, a pioneering rocket in space history as it was the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
On the 4 October 1957 the world witnessed the launch of the famous Sputnik 1, the first ever humanmade satellite, aboard an R-7 rocket. This was an important milestone in the Space Race as it made clear that the Soviets were ahead their rivals, the United States.
The next step was to get a living creature into space, and this happened during the following month. Aboard Sputnik 2 and another R-7 rocket was Laika, the heroic dog who became the first animal to make an orbit of the Earth. Unfortunately there was no mechanism to bring the dog back to Earth, and Laika died from heat exhaustion within five hours.
The 1960s had rolled around, and Korolev was determined to send a Soviet cosmonaut to the Moon. This was intensified by the launch of the first manned spaceflight. On board the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft, a member of the R-7 rocket family, was the calm, cool and composed Yuri Gagarin, who flew around the Earth once and safely parachuted back to ground.
This breakthrough was followed by the first lunar surveillance missions, Luna 1, 2 and 3, but the United States won the manned race to the Moon. Without the efforts of Korolev the Soviet Union wouldn’t have even got off the ground. He was incredibly influential when it came to these space milestones, but it is the names of Laika and Gagarin that are remembered. Korolev would never see humans land on the Moon as he passed away from cancer on 14 January 1966, five months before the Apollo 11 lunar landing.