Chapter one: New Moon

Chapter one, inasmuch as it refers to Sergei Korolev, is based on secondary sources. Anyone interested in an account based on primary sources should look for a bio­graphy by Jim Harford that was published this fall (1997) by John Wiley and Sons.

Even the secondary sources about Sergei Korolev are sparse, and in each case it was essential to consider carefully who wrote it, where the author was at the time, and when and where the account of Korolev was published. I also attempted to establish whether any given anecdote had similar sources or whether it came from genuinely independent accounts. I have allowed my imagination to have more play in this chapter than in the rest of the book.

Despite being the chief designer of cosmic rocket systems, Korolev was unknown in the West at the time of the launch of Sputnik (page 8). In a 1959 bibliography on Soviet missiles and state personnel (Library of Con-

gress reference TL 789.8.R9H21) intended to give the U. S. technical world information about Soviet activities, Korolev is listed in a publica­tion from HRB-Singer only as someone interested in liquid-fueled rocket engines.

Grigory Tokady, a defector, first disclosed that Korolev was the chief designer for the Soviet space program during a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society in 1961. His revelation was not widely reported.

One of the best accounts of Sergei Korolev’s early life is by Yaroslav Golo­vanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship of a Space Pioneer (Novosti, 1976). The book gives a brief account of the launch of Sputnik, but otherwise is devoted entirely to Korolev’s youth; his early poetic efforts; and his rela­tionships with his mother, grandmother, and stepfather (pages 15 and 16).

It is the only book I found that explores the events and relationships that shaped the man. Clearly, the author has interviewed many people who knew Korolev and has tried to evaluate some of the folklore that has grown up around him, in particular, Korolev’s purported meeting with Tsiolkovsky. Irritatingly, Golovanov’s account stops before Korolev was arrested by Stalin’s secret police. The author is reported to have completed a full biography, written in Russian, and to be in search of a publisher.

Details of Korolev’s state of mind in prison in Moscow, his activities there, and the impact that his incarceration in Kolyma had on him appear in Georgii Oserov’s book, published in Paris, En Prison avec Tupolev (A. Michel, 1973). Oserov was in prison with Korolev and the elite of national aeronautics.

Walter McDougall’s book. . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age chronicles the USSR’s fascination from Lenin’s time with technology and the country’s national goal of achieving technical supremacy. This goal led to internal tensions and confrontations between the government and the intelligentsia.

McDougall describes how Marshal Tukhachevsky became a victim of Stalin’s purges and how in 1938 the rocketeers, including Korolev, joined Stalin’s earlier victims, the aircraft designers, in the Gulag’s prison camps.

McDougall reports that Korolev’s failures in early 1957 encouraged his rival Chalomei to attempt to have him dismissed.

Other less detailed accounts of Korolev’s early years exist. The Kremlin and the Cosmos, by Nicholas Damloff (Knopf, 1972), for example, provides a good summary of Korolev’s schooling without the attempts that Golo­vanov makes to explore his psyche. The account is hopelessly inadequate once one enters the difficult years of arrest, concentration camps, and divorce. Daniloff does, however, mention briefly that there were “trying and despairing situations” in Korolev’s life.

Daniloff also gives an account of the launch of Sputnik and of the engineers retiring to an observation bunker a kilometer from the launch pad (pages 10, 18, and 19).

Aleksei Ivanov, an engineer who worked on Sputnik, also recounts the launch (pages 10, 18, and 19) in an article in Isvestia marking the tenth anniversary of Sputnik. He wrote, “I watch not moving my eyes away, fearing to blink so as not to miss the moment of liftoff.”

Another book, more a hagiography than a biography, about Korolev is Spacecraft Designer: The Story of Sergei Korolev (Novosti, 1976). The author, Alexander Romanov, says that he first met Korolev in 1961. If one is care­ful, some details seem worth extracting from this book. The author describes Korolev as a heavyset man, a description that photographs sup­port. His account of Korolev’s small, wood-paneled office with black­board, chalk, lunar globe, bronze bust of Lenin, and model of Sputnik seems plausible, as does his account of a formidable intellect and an ener­getic man with willpower, energy, and vision.

Romanov repeats uncritically the story that Korolev met Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Kaluga in 1929. Romanov reports that after that meeting, Korolev said, “The meaning of my life came down to one thing—to reach the stars.”

Romanov demonstrates Korolev’s dedication to rocketry with an extract from a letter that Korolev wrote to his second wife in which he wrote, “The boundless book of knowledge and life… is being leafed through for the first time by us here.”

Romanov also reports that it was Korolev who wanted Sputnik to be spherical, which, given Korolev’s authority in the program, seems likely. Romanov says that Korolev said, “It seemed to me that the first Sputnik must have a simple and expressive form close to the shape of celestial bodies.”

More details of Korolev’s character—his strictness, compassion, and demanding nature—appear in a collection of essays entitled Pioneers of Space, which were compiled by Victor Mitroshenkov (Progress Publishers, 1989). Korolevs engineering intuitiveness apparently amazed his colleagues.

In one of the essays, Nikolai Kuznetsov, who headed the cosmonaut training center from 1963, wrote that Korolev liked the cosmonauts to meet the ground staff so that “cosmodrome specialist and cosmonaut could look one another in the eye.” It was Korolev’s way of ensuring that work on Earth was carried out conscientiously. This, together with his recorded friendship with cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov, is the basis for my saying on page 8 that Korolev cared deeply about the fate of his cosmonauts.

Another essay by Pavel Popovich and Alexander Nemov says that peo­ple found Korolev either sincere, unpretentious, and accessible, or mercilessly strict and demanding with slackers. He was, they say, intolerant of vanity.

The essays include brief accounts of the months before the launch and contain nice details, such as Korolev’s habit of lifting his little finger to his eyebrow when vexed.

Other books in which snippets of information about Sputnik, Korolev, and the space race appear that back up information from the main sources include Soviet Rocketry; Past, Present and Future, by Michael Stoiko (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); Russians in Space, by Evgeny Riabchikov (prepared by Novosti Press Agency, published New York, Doubleday, 1971); Soviet Writings on Earth Satellites and Space Travel, editor Ari Stern – field (Freeport, NY, Books for Libraries Press, 1970); Red Star in Orbit, by James Oberg (Random House, 1981). Oberg quotes Solzhenitsyn as say­ing that Korolev worked on his rocket at night; The Sputnik Crisis and Early United States Space Policy, by Rip Bulkeley (Indiana University Press, 1991), and Race into Space:The Soviet Space Program, by Brian Harvey (Ellis Horwood, a division of John Wiley, 1988).

A description of the location of the Baikonur cosmodrome and the rela­tive position of Korolev’s cottage can be found in this 1986 edition of Janefs Spaceflight Directory.

Information about the events of the IGY meeting on rockets and satellites in Washington, DC, appears in the archives of the National Academy of Sciences.

The IGY meeting in Washington was reported in the New York Times, October 4, 1957.

The anecdote about Korolev’s conversation with Alexei Leonov a few nights before he died comes from Jim Harford. Harford also talked to me about Korolev’s visit to Peenemiinde after World War II.

Khrushchev’s views on the significance to the Soviet Union of ICBMs are to be found in his autobiography, Khrushchev Remembers:The Last Testa­ment, translated by Strobe Talbot (Little Brown).

Khrushchev describes his casual attitude toward Korolev’s news of the launch of Sputnik to James Reston in an interview published in the New York Times on October 8, 1957. Khrushchev says he congratulated Korolev, then went to bed.

An understanding of what life in prison was like for Korolev can be found in The First Circle, by Aleksandor Solzhenitsyn.

Though chapter one is about Korolev because it was his satellite that opened the space age, Robert Goddard was the man who built and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket—a fact of which Korolev was well aware. A companion book for anyone interested in the pioneering days of rocketry therefore is Robert H. Goddard: Pioneer of Space Research, by Milton Lehman (Da Capo Press, 1988). The footnote about the launch of the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket comes from this book. Lehman’s book was published first as This High Man (Da Capo Press, 1963).

I found information about general historical events, such as the coup that Khrushchev faced down in June 1957 (page 11), in A History of the Soviet Union, by Geoffrey Hosking (Fontana, 1985).