Let’s learn more about the genius who was behind sending the first man to the moon.

Young Sergei

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was born on the 12 January 1907, or if you’re still using the Julian calendar, the 30 December 1906. He was born in Zhytomyr, at the time it was considered the Russian Empire, but is now located in the Ukraine.

When he was young he studied at the Odessa Building Trades School, but after being fascinated by aircraft, he moved to the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, and went on to the Moscow N.E. Bauman Higher Technical School. It was at the Technical School where he studied aeronautical engineering and was taught by the distinguished Soviet aircraft designer, Andrey Tupolev.

Tupolev was immediately impressed with his young student, describing him as:

A man with unlimited devotion to his job and his ideas.

What’s interesting about Korolev’s journey is that when he started learning about rocket propulsion, it was still a theoretical subject.

As 1931 came along, Korolev founded the Group for Investigation of Reactive Motion, or GIRD, where his team developed the first liquid-propellant rockets. And they were launched in 1933 to great success.

The Gulag

As Korolev was enjoying the start to what looked to be an amazing career in rocket science. This was brought to an abrupt end when on 27 June 1938, he was arrested by the secret police. As just another victim of Stalin’s Great Terror, he was sentenced to ten years forced labour on mysterious charges.

But as bad as Korolev’s experience was, compared to others he got it pretty light. He spent two years moving between jails, before spending 4 months at a gold mine in a Kolyma Gulag.

It really wasn’t a fun time for Korolev, while he survived he did suffer physically. He lost all his teeth, by suffering multiple beatings his jaw was broken and it’s a definite possibility that he had a heart attack.

Korolev was brought back from the Gulag, supposedly at Tupolev’s request. Tupolev had his own team and managed to convince the powers that be that Korolev would be an asset to his team, serving the Soviet Union.

Race to the Moon

If we fast forward to November 1944, Korolev was given his own team and in just three days managed to come up with a proposal for a Soviet equivalent to the German V2 missile.

He was even sent to Germany to have a look at the V2 hardware that had been left behind. The German rocket design team, headed by Wernher von Braun, had all defected to the United Sates, meaning that the US had a head start when it came to the rocket game. So of course Russia had to step up their own research centre.

Even though he was technically still a political prisoner, Korolev was given the role of Chief Engineer and was responsible for his V2 equivalent missile.

Korolev worked on several missiles before, in 1953, he turned his attention to the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. This missile had a range of 7000 km and would continue to be an asset, not just to Russia, but to the rest of the world for several decades, even having its strengths today.

The 21st August 1957 saw the successful launch of the rocket near Baikonur in Kazakhstan. This was a massive success for the Soviet Union, as the United States looked to be 15 months behind where Korolev had Russia.

Here’s Tom Wolfe in his book The Right Stuff, telling us what it was like at the time:

He seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will, there was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let NASA struggle furiously to catch up – and then launch some startling new demonstration of just how far ahead he really was.

On the 4th October 1957, Korolev scored another win when Sputnik was launched, being the first satellite to find itself in the orbit of the earth. And this satellite was powered by that original R-7 rocket.

Korolev’s team was under major pressure to produce Sputnik 2 for the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. And yet again Sputnik 2 was a success, and the first attempt by the US to achieve the same thing, ended in a failure. Allowing the Soviets to think quite highly of themselves.

Among Korolev’s firsts were: the first probe to the moon, Venus and Mars, the first picture of the far side of the moon, the first dog in space, the first two-man crew, the first woman and the first three-man crew in space.

Here’s an excerpt from James Harford’s book Korolev, How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon, telling us what it was light to work for the man:

His ability to inspire large teams, as well as individuals, is proverbial … His consuming passion was work, work, work for space exploration and for the defence of his country. One wonders how he maintained such an unswerving loyalty to a system that had treated him so cruelly.

And Korolev’s next challenge? To get a full sized human man into space and to get him safely back to Earth.

In order to get that man into space, Korolev got one of the spy satellites that were in production and modified it to fit a human by replacing the imaging technology with a seat. And after extensive tests, the spacecraft, named Vostok, was launched into space using an upgraded R-7 rocket on 12 April 1961. And in that one seat? Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space. The take-off was a little different to what we see on the news today. There was no countdown with Korolev’s launch, apparently it was

A silly, American affectation.

And then the real race began. In May 1961 John F Kennedy, the US President at the time issued a proper challenge to the Soviet Union when he declared that the US would put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

While Korolev was focused on this new objective, some had the idea to criticise him because the missiles that he was creating weren’t great for being strategically useful in a weapon sense. But what these blind critics didn’t realise, was that weapon usage wasn’t the point, the idea was to get enough power to get a guy into space and to still have enough power to get him back down again. And again it was the R-7 who would be able to get the job done.

But Korolev wasn’t doing too great. The injuries he has sustained while imprisoned in the Gulag was starting to catch up to him. Here’s what Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony had to say about Korolev in their book, Starman: The Truth behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin:

People thought of him as a burly man, built like a bear, but the truth was that his body was made rigid by countless ancient injuries. He could not turn his neck, but had to swivel his upper torso to look people in the eye; nor could he open his jaws wide enough to laugh out loud.

And then 1965 rolled around, and Korolev was diagnosed with cancer. Needing surgery, Korolev was admitted to hospital for what was expected to be a routine procedure. But during the operation, he haemorrhaged, and because of his injuries, particularly to his jaw, the doctors weren’t able to do much to help him.

Sergei Korolev never regained consciousness and died, aged 59 on the 14th January 1966.

After Korolev had passed, the Russian space programme struggled. Without him heading up the N1 launcher, the engineers soon ran into problems especially without having someone to guide them. And in August of 1974, the programme was cancelled.

And yet Korolev’s legacy did not die with him. There is currently only one way to get astronauts to the international space station. And it is on a Soyuz launcher, powered by a rocket very similar to the R-7 designed by Korolev.

Here’s what John Lodgson, a space expert from George Washington University has to say about that:

The rocket we now rely on to put humans into space is essentially the same launch vehicle, taking off from the same launch pad, that was built by Korolev and which took Gagarin into space. Half a century later, we are back where we started. It raises the question of whether or not the world is serious about human spaceflight.

Throughout his time working as a rocket designer, Korolev was only known publicly as the ‘Chief Designer’, his name was never disclosed. The Soviet Government claimed this was to protect him from American assassins, but this is the same government who sent him to a labour camp in Siberia, so who knows what their reason was.

The world found out about everything that Sergei Korolev had done for his country when Pravda, a Russian newspaper featured a double page obituary on the man. He was even given a state funeral and thousands were in attendance when his ashes were brought through the Red Square and interred in the Kremlin Wall where they still sit.

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