Sergei Korolev: the rocket genius behind Yuri Gagarin

Sergei Korolev: the rocket genius
behind Yuri Gagarin
50 years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
But the unsung hero of the Soviet Union's triumph was a
brilliant scientist who survived Stalin's purges

             Robin McKie
             The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 rocket blasts off from Baikonur on 12 April 1961.
Photograph: Rex Features
It remains the one untarnished triumph of Soviet science. On 12 April
1961, a peasant farmer's son with a winsome smile crammed himself
into a capsule eight feet in diameter and was blasted into space on
top of a rocket 20 storeys high. One hundred and eight minutes later,
after making a single orbit of our world, the young pilot parachuted
back to Earth. In doing so, Yuri Gagarin became the first human
being to journey into space.

The flight of Vostok 1 – whose 50th anniversary will be celebrated

next month – was a defining moment of the 20th century and opened
up the prospect of interplanetary travel for our species. It also made
Gagarin an international star while his mission was hailed as clear
proof of the superiority of communist technology. The 27-year-old
cosmonaut became a figurehead for the Soviet Union and toured the
world. He lunched with the Queen; was kissed by Gina Lollobrigida;
and holidayed with the privileged in Crimea.

Gagarin also received more than a million letters from fans across the
world, an astonishing outpouring of global admiration – for he was not
obvious star material. He was short and slightly built. Yet Gagarin
possessed a smile "that lit up the darkness of the cold war", as one
writer put it, and had a natural grace that made him the best
ambassador that the USSR ever had. Even his flaws seem oddly
endearing by modern standards, his worst moment occurring when
he gashed his head after leaping from a window to avoid his wife who
had discovered a girl in his hotel room.

To many Russians, Gagarin occupies the same emotional territory as
John F Kennedy or Princess Diana. The trio even share the intense
attention of conspiracy theorists with alien abduction, a CIA plot and
suicide all being blamed for Gagarin's death in 1968.

At the same time, his flight's anniversary will give Russians a chance
to reflect on the former might of the Soviet empire. Ravaged by a war
that had killed more than 26 million of its citizens, the USSR learned,
within a generation, how to orbit satellites, aim probes at the moon
and finally put a man into space. It was an extraordinary
demonstration of the might of the Soviet people. At least, that is what
was claimed at the time.

In fact, Gagarin's flight was anything but a collective affair. In the
years that have followed the USSR's disintegration, it has become
clear that his mission was a highly individualistic business with one
man dominating proceedings: Sergei Korolev, the chief designer – a
shadowy figure who was only revealed to have masterminded the
USSR's rocket wizardry after his death in 1966. The remarkable story
of his genius, his survival in the Gulags; his transformation into one of
the most powerful men in the Soviet Union – and his interaction with
his favourite cosmonaut, his "little eagle" Yuri Gagarin, is the real
story behind that flight on 12 April 1961. Gagarin became the face of

Soviet space supremacy, while Korolev was its brains. The pair made
a potent team and their success brought fame to one and immense
power to the other. Neither lived long to enjoy those rewards,
however.

The man who would lead the world into the space age, Sergei
Pavlovich Korolev, was born on 12 January 1907, in Zhitomir, in
modern-day Ukraine. His mother Maria left her husband Pavel while
Sergei was young and remarried – though Korolev went on to have a
good relationship with his stepfather. Like Gagarin, he was besotted
with flying and aeronautics and studied in Moscow under Andrei
Tupolev, the distinguished Soviet aircraft designer. Tupolev described
his young student "as a man with unlimited devotion to his job and his
ideas".

Korolev qualified as a pilot and began designing gliders to which he
added rocket engines. In 1933, he successfully launched the first
liquid-fuelled rocket in the USSR. He prospered for he was hard-
working and loyal to the Soviet system. It was not enough. On 27
June 1938, four secret service agents broke into his apartment and
arrested him as a spy. Korolev was beaten. He asked for a glass of
water and a jailer smashed the jug in his face. In the end, Korolev
was forced to admit to crimes of treason and sabotage and was
sentenced to 10 years' hard labour at the Kolyma gold mine, the most
notorious of all Gulag prison camps. Korolev never found out why he
had been picked out.

He survived Kolyma but lost all his teeth, his jaw was broken and he
may have suffered a heart attack. He was, as his biographer James
Harford says, just another "egregious example of the incredible
stupidity, not to speak of callous cruelty, of the purges of Joseph
Stalin". More than five million Soviet men and women were arrested
and either shot, jailed or sent to the Gulags during the Great Purge
that was unleashed in the 30s.

After five months, Korolev was released from Kolyma – probably
because Tupolev intervened on his behalf – and he spent the next
five years in jail in Moscow working, officially, on aircraft and rocket
design with other imprisoned engineers. Then, in 1945, he was made
a colonel in the Red Army and sent to Germany. It was a remarkable
change in his fortunes and it occurred for a simple reason: the

Russians had captured Nazi stores of V2 rocket components and
wanted to use them to develop their own missile system. Korolev's
credentials were ideal.

The V2's guidance systems, turbo-pumps and engines were of
startling sophistication, Korolev realised. However, the rocket's
designer, Werner von Braun, and his team had defected to the
Americans, with several complete V2s. This gave the US a huge
advantage in the race to develop missiles from the Nazis' technology.
But Korolev was a gifted engineer and designer – and an obsessive
worker. "I can never forget, on going home, if there is something
wrong with a technique," he told a colleague. He slept for only a few
hours a night, lived frugally and on 21 August 1957 launched the
Soviet R-7 rocket, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, on
a 4,000-mile journey from Baikonur cosmodrome, in modern-day
Kazakhstan, to the Kamchatka peninsula. He had beaten the USA by
15 months.

"His ability to inspire large teams, as well as individuals, is
proverbial," says Harford in Korolev: How One Man Masterminded
the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon. "He had a roaring
temper, was prone to shout and use expletives, but was quick to
forgive and forget. 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."

Von Braun may have built the V2 and later the Saturn V rocket that
took Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon, but his achievements were
dwarfed by those of Korolev. The chief designer – he was never
named in state communiqués because of official disapproval of "the
cult of personalities" – developed the first intercontinental missile and
then launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1. He also put into
space the first dog, the first two-man crew, the first woman, the first
three-man crew; directed the first walk in space; created the first
Soviet spy satellite and communication satellite; built mighty launch
vehicles and flew spacecraft towards the moon, Venus and Mars –
and all on a shoestring budget.

However, it was the launch of the first man into space that truly
marked out Korolev – and Gagarin – for greatness.

Yuri Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934, in Klushino, in the Smolensk
region, 100 miles west of Moscow. His father and mother worked on
the local collective farm, he as a storeman, she with a dairy herd,
according to Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony in their book Starman:
The Truth behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin. In October 1942, the
village was overrun by retreating German troops. The Gagarins were
thrown out of their home and had to dig a shelter to survive the
winter. Later Yuri's brother Valentin and sister Zoya were deported to
labour camps in Poland.

Remarkably the family survived and in 1950 Yuri was sent to Moscow
to train as a steel foundryman before enrolling in the newly built
technical school in Saratov, where he took up flying, eventually
becoming a military pilot. He was stationed in Murmansk and flew
MiG-15 jets on reconnaissance missions.

In October 1959, a set of recruiting teams began visiting air bases
across the Soviet Union. Nothing was said about the nature of their
mission. In any case, most pilots failed the tests they were set. A
privileged few, including Gagarin, were selected and sent to
Burdenko military hospital in Moscow where the pilot recalled being
examined, intensely, by groups of doctors. "They tapped our bodies
with hammers, twisted us about on special devices and checked the
vestibular organs in our ears," Gagarin recalled. "They tested us from
head to toe."

Korolev – who had already stunned the world with the launch of
Sputnik 1, the first satellite – was now preparing for his ultimate
achievement: putting a human in space. After his earlier experiment
with the ill-fated Laika, he had successfully flown a dog into orbit and
returned it safely to Earth. And if a dog could do it, it was surely time
for a human. However, at the time, doctors – both in the east and the
west – were unsure about how the human frame would respond to
the intense forces of launch and then the weightlessness of orbit.
Hence their obsession with astronauts' fitness. In the end, 20 pilots
were selected – only for them to find that the early version of the
Vostok capsule that Korolev had come up with was so cramped, only
those under 5ft 6in could get in it. The slightly built Gagarin fitted in
nicely. Many of the others did not.

In the end, only Gherman Titov provided real competition for Gagarin.

He was a brilliant pilot, intense, self-possessed and, as befits a
teacher's son, was well-educated and fond of quoting poetry. A week
before Vostok's lift-off, the choice was whittled down to the two of
them.

Titov was convinced he would win but days before launch was told it
would be Gagarin who would be going. Titov never got over being the
second, largely unremembered man in space – he flew Vostok 2 on 6
August 1961 – and in 1998, shortly before his death, he still spoke
bitterly about his rival: "Some people will tell you I gave him a hug
[when his selection was announced]. Nonsense. There was none of
that."

Behind the scenes, powerful forces had been backing Gagarin.
Khrushchev knew spaceflight was a potent propaganda weapon.
"Khrushchev and Gagarin were both peasant farmers' sons while
Titov was middle-class," argue Bizony and Doran. "If Gagarin could
reach the greatest heights, then Khrushchev's rise to power from
similarly humble origins was validated."

So it was the peasant workers' son who headed for glory on the
morning of 12 April 1961. He took the bus to the launch pad with
Titov in tow – just in case there was a last-minute emergency. Both
were wearing spacesuits. Then Gagarin stood up to go. "According to
Russian tradition, one should kiss the person going away three times
on alternating cheeks," cameraman Vladimir Suvorov recalled. "But
they were wearing spacesuits with helmets attached, so they simply
clanged against each other."

Gagarin squirmed into his capsule and waited. There was no
countdown – a silly, American affectation according to Korolev who,
at 9.06am, simply pressed an ignition key and the R-7 rose slowly
from the pad. Gagarin shouted: "Poyekhali!" ("Let's go!")

"After the launch, there was complete silence in mission control apart
from an operator repeating, every 30 seconds, that 'the flight is
normal'," recalls Mikhail Marov, one of Korolev's research engineers.
"Then he announced the ship had reached orbit and there was huge
shout of joy." Marov – a fellow of the Russian Academy of Science
who subsequently headed several space missions – today
remembers Gagarin's talking quietly and calmly. "I can see clouds. I

can see everything. It's beautiful," he told mission control. Around
9.50 Vostok began its sweep over America. Half an hour later its
engine was retrofired and the capsule began its descent. Every
manoeuvre had been controlled by Korolev from the ground.

"Those minutes seemed like eternity," Marov recalls. Then it was
announced that Gagarin had landed safely. The Soviet press agency
Tass immediately broadcast details of the flight and within minutes,
crowds began to fill the streets of Moscow. "They looked like surging
seas," says Marov. "I have never seen such enthusiasm of ordinary
people. They took Gagarin's triumph as a personal victory."

In fact, his flight came perilously close to being a personal loss. As it
began its descent, Gagarin's capsule should have separated from the
main spaceship but a cable did not detach. The capsule began to
spin and tumble "like a yo-yo" as one engineer later described it,
exposing unprotected areas to the searing heat of re-entry. The
temperature inside rose dangerously. "I was in a cloud of fire rushing
toward Earth," Gagarin recalled. Ten minutes later the errant cable
burned through; the two modules separated; and Gagarin's capsule
ceased its wild rotation. The cosmonaut, who had nearly lost
consciousness, blew open its hatch and was ejected, as planned, to
make a parachute descent. He landed close to the village of
Smelovka, near Saratov in southern Russia. "I saw a woman and a
little girl coming toward me. I began to wave my arms and yell. I said I
was a Soviet and had come from space."

News of Gagarin's flight swept round the globe. "Man in space!" the
London Evening News announced that day while the following
morning's Guardian proclaimed: "Russia hails Columbus of space:
World's first astronaut home safely." In the US, which had its own
space ambitions, the news was less welcome. Reporters pressed
Nasa for a quote and phoned press officer John "Shorty" Powers at
4.30am. Powers, outraged at the call, snarled: "What is this! We're all
asleep down here!" Next morning's US headlines included the
classic: "Soviets put man in space. Spokesman says US asleep."

Powers wasn't far wrong, of course. At the time, Nasa was preparing
its own manned Mercury missions but had got no further than a 17-
minute test-flight with a chimp called Ham. Korolev had beaten the
USA easily. "He seemed to be able to play these little games with his

adversaries at will," says Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. "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
how just how far ahead he really was." One newspaper cartoon even
showed a chimpanzee telling another: "We are a little behind the
Russians and a little ahead of the Americans."

Hugo Young, writing in the Times, was more straightforward.
"Gagarin's triumph pitilessly mocked the image of dynamism which
President Kennedy had offered the American people. It had to be
avenged almost as much for his sake as for the nation's." So
Kennedy wrote a memo demanding that a space programme be
found that promised dramatic results and that the United States could
win. The crucial words were "dramatic" and "win". Only a manned
lunar landing filled those criteria.

Thus, on 25 May 1961 – a few weeks after Gagarin's flight – Kennedy
made his speech committing the United States to sending a man to
the moon and returning him safely before the end of the decade. The
Space Race was on. "That speech, that reaction needs to be
understood as a key part of the fight of Yuri Gagarin because his
mission was the immediate stimulus for the landing of Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin," says space expert Professor John Logsdon of
George Washington University.

Few observers gave America much chance of victory. The Soviet
programme looked unbeatable with Gagarin and Korolev as its face
and brains. It was not to be, however. Korolev was living on borrowed
time. He had already suffered one heart attack and was now
succumbing slowly to illnesses brought on by his treatment in the
Gulag. "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," say Doran and Bizony. "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."

On 5 January 1966, Korolev was admitted to hospital for what was
supposed to be routine surgery. But during the operation, on 14
January, he haemorrhaged on the operating table. Doctors tried to
put a tube into his lungs to keep him breathing but found his jaw had
been broken so badly in the Gulag, they couldn't pass it through his

damaged throat. He never regained consciousness and died, aged
59, later that day. For the first time, the Soviet people learned who
the chief designer was. Pravda ran a two-page obituary and Korolev
was given a state funeral. Thousands gathered as his ashes were
carried through Red Square to the Kremlin Wall. Gagarin gave the
final eulogy.

Korolev's little eagle only survived his mentor by two years. On 27
March, Gagarin took off from Chkalovsky airbase on a MiG-15UTI jet
with fellow pilot Vladimir Seryogin. It crashed a few minutes later,
killing both men. A KGB investigation suggested that a near-miss with
another jet had sent Gagarin's plane spinning out of control, though
the cause of the accident remains unclear and the subject of
unending conspiracy theories. On 4 April 1968 – after a huge state
funeral in which tens of thousands gathered – Gagarin's ashes were
interred close to Korolev's. The Soviet space programme had been
orphaned.

Before his death, Korolev had designed a mighty launcher, the N1,
which was intended to carry men to the moon. Engineers continued
to work on it but without the chief designer's guidance and inspiration,
they were lost. In 1969, just as America was perfecting its Apollo
missions, two unmanned test N1 launches were carried out. The first
exploded in flight. The second didn't even make it off the launch pad.
"The rocket fell over, destroying the entire launch complex," says
Harford. The Soviet lunar dream was over. Weeks later, Armstrong
and Aldrin were walking on the moon.

The might of the US aerospace industry had prevailed and America
emerged as winners of the space race, though there is an ironic coda
to this story, one that Korolev would have certainly enjoyed. After
Apollo, the US went on to develop the space shuttle, the world's first
reusable spacecraft, which was used – among many tasks – to
construct the international space station. By the 1980s, the US was
flaunting its space prowess. Then things went badly awry. Two
shuttle accidents caused the deaths of 14 astronauts. As a result, the
craft will be grounded later this year.

And after that, there will be only one way to get astronauts – no
matter what their nationality – to the space station: on a Russian
Soyuz launcher, a rocket derived from the R-7 that Korolev designed

to put Gagarin into space. As Logsdon says: "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."

It also demonstrates, starkly, the enduring genius of Sergei Pavlovich
Korolev, the man who launched Yuri Gagarin.

EYEWITNESS: The day I saw Gagarin
I have an intense, very personal memory of Yuri Gagarin. The young
pilot, newly promoted to the rank of major, visited Britain a few
months after his great flight. I was 11 years old at the time and
fanatical about astronomy and space science. My mother, to my
eternal gratitude, spotted that Gagarin would be opening the Soviet
Trade Fair in London on 11 July when our family was on holiday in
the city visiting relatives. (We lived in Glasgow.) I remember standing
at the front of a fairly large crowd that afternoon. A car drew up and
Gagarin bounced out. He marched smartly towards us, waving
cheerfully before bounding into the exhibition. I could only have had a
few seconds' sight of him but have a vivid recollection of his
smartness, compact body and, most noticeable of all, his angelic
smile.

My fleeting glimpse of the first man in space has stayed with me in
the intervening half-century though at the time I was more interested
in the trade fair itself, with its full-size models of the Soviets' early
Sputnik probes and other scientific paraphernalia. I also collected a
magazine that showed - in detail - how the USSR would get to the
moon long before America. Sadly I did not keep it.

Gagarin went on to meet the Queen, lay a wreath at Karl Marx's
grave and visit Manchester, rather bizarrely as the guest of the
Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers. Gagarin charmed wherever
he went, though I rather liked the remark by then prime minister
Harold Macmillan, who noted the people who lined the streets to see
the cosmonaut. "There would have been twice the number if they had
sent the dog," he muttered.