The man behind Sputnik had once been sent to a labour camp in Kolyma
Sergei Korolev, who would steer the Soviet Union to the first satellite and the first human in orbit, was arrested in June 1938 during Stalin's purges and shipped to a Kolyma forced-labour camp the following year. His old professor, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, got him moved to a prison workshop for engineers in 1940.
The purge gutted a promising field. In the 1930s Soviet rocketry roughly matched Germany's. Enthusiasts in a group known as GIRD, Korolev among them, launched the country's first hybrid-fuel rocket in August 1933 and its first liquid-fuel rocket that November. Then, in 1937, two leaders of the merged rocket institute, Ivan Kleymyonov and Georgy Langemak, were arrested and executed, and Valentin Glushko and many other engineers were sent to the Gulag.
Theory had deep roots. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky derived the rocket equation and in 1929 proposed multistage rockets. Yuri Kondratyuk devised the first known version of the lunar orbit rendezvous later used to reach the Moon, and Friedrich Zander suggested in 1925 that a spacecraft could use planetary moons' gravity to speed up and slow down, an early take on gravity assist.
After the war, Soviet specialists studied captured V-2s alongside German engineers, and in October 1946 some 302 German rocket experts were deported to the Soviet Union, though their influence faded after 1947. Korolev, meanwhile, hid his dream of spaceflight behind military work on missiles capable of reaching America, since many scoffed at satellites. Still, in July 1951 two dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, rode a rocket to 101 kilometres and came back alive.
The payoff was a run of firsts: the first intercontinental missile and Sputnik 1 in 1957, Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, the first spacewalk, the first space station, Salyut 1, and robotic milestones such as the first soft landings on the Moon and Venus and the first lunar rovers. Unlike NASA, the programme was split among competing design bureaus. Its legacy flies on in Soyuz spacecraft and the Chinese Shenzhou capsule.
Source: Soviet space program
