The Soviet space program's mastermind was known publicly only as Chief Designer
While Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin made world headlines, the engineer behind them had no public name. Sergei Korolev appeared only as the glavny konstruktor, the chief designer, partly to shield him from assassination, and even some cosmonauts who worked alongside him never learned who he was until he died in 1966.
The achievements credited to that anonymous figure stack up quickly. Korolev directed the R-7, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, and adapted versions of it launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and carried the dog Laika into orbit. Luna 2 was the first spacecraft to strike the Moon, the dogs Belka and Strelka returned alive from orbit, and Vostok 1 made Gagarin the first person in space.
He had started out building aircraft. Born on 12 January 1907 in Zhytomyr, then in the Russian Empire, he was raised largely by grandparents in Nizhyn after his parents separated; his mother told him his father had died, and he never saw him again. An air show in 1913 sparked his interest in flight, and at 17 he designed a glider called the K-5. He studied aviation in Kiev and Moscow, earned a pilot's licence in 1930, and that year began thinking about liquid-fuelled rocket engines for planes.
In 1931 he and the enthusiast Friedrich Zander helped create the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, one of the earliest state-backed rocket centres. It was merged in 1933 into a larger institute alongside Valentin Glushko and other leading talent, with Korolev as deputy head. The same year he married Xenia Vincentini, who had turned down his first proposal in 1924 to continue her studies.
Then came Stalin's Great Purge. Arrested on 27 June 1938 on charges later shown to be false, Korolev was first listed for execution along with 74 other specialists before his sentence was reduced to hard labour. He spent nearly six years in prisons and camps, including several months at Kolyma in the far east of Siberia, writing appeal after appeal, among them letters to Stalin himself. Released, he went back to engineering and built the programme that put the Soviet Union first into space.
Source: Sergei Korolev
