Sergei Korolev

Sergei Korolev directed the Soviet space programme and his name was a state secret until he died. Born in Zhytomyr in 1907, he trained as an aeronautical engineer under Andrei Tupolev, designed gliders, and co-founded a rocket research group that became a state institute. In 1938, during the purges, he was denounced, tortured — his jaw was broken and never healed properly — and sentenced to ten years. He spent months in the Kolyma gold mines, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and nearly died, and was then transferred to a sharashka, a prison design bureau, working under Tupolev, who was also a prisoner. He was released in 1944 and formally rehabilitated only in 1957. He was made chief designer of the long-range missile programme and developed the R-7, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, whose clustered boosters gave it the payload capacity that made everything else possible. Derivatives of it still fly. He argued for using it to launch a satellite, and on 4 October 1957 Sputnik 1 went into orbit, which produced a political shock in the United States out of all proportion to the object. The firsts followed in succession: Laika, the first lunar impact and photographs of the far side, Yuri Gagarin's flight on 12 April 1961, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, and Alexei Leonov's spacewalk in 1965. He was identified publicly only as the Chief Designer, which meant he could not be nominated for a Nobel Prize. He died in January 1966 during surgery, at fifty-nine, and the Soviet lunar programme lost coherence without him.

• Lived: 1907 CE – 1966 CE
• Nationality: Soviet
• Roles: engineer, rocket_scientist