Gagarin and KorolyovKorolyov was born in Ukraine, in 1907 and had a lonely childhood in what we would today call a broken family. His parents separated and he never met his father ever again, being lied to by his mother that his father was dead. he attended school like any other child and showed an aptitude for aviation, eventually studying flight theory and in 1923 he joined the Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation of Ukraine and the Crimea. Gliders were all the range back then (lots of future rocket engineers were big on gliders as young men) and Korolyov was no exception designing his own glider and training as an aviator. In 1930 he graduated and joined the Tupolev design bureau and became the lead engineer on the TB-3 bomber project.
Korolyov didn't stand out during these early years. The Soviets were churning out engineers to catch up with the other industrial nations and Russia had a great many accomplished engineers already. Things only really began to change when Korolyov joined the Russian Group of Study of Reactive Motion, known by the acronym GIRD, this was Russia's version of Germany's VfR. GIRD (and the VfR) are the hatching grounds for virtually all the great rocket designs of the twentieth century and in close competition these two organisations became a fast moving internal community where idea's and new thinking radically expanded from theory to design.
A modern R7 (green) fitted to a Soyuz space craft (white). 2003. GIRD eventually became the Jet Propulsion Research Institute, and Korolyov was made Deputy Chief, in charge of cruise missile and rocket assisted glider designs. The latter gives a good indication of how young these fields of engineering were. No one at the time was able to see clearly which idea's would resolve themselves into practical designs, so a lot of effort was spent looking into any unusual idea that came along, such as rocket assisted gliders. This is the reason why I like the 1930's so much. Technology was still an adventure, naive perhaps, but still untainted by pollution, industrial murder and the atomic bomb. The stains of history had yet to appear on the spotless white lab coats. I wonder if any of the engineers of that time had any inkling of the future they were building. Many of the men at GIRD (for I've never yet heard of a female rocket engineer) were idealists who saw the future as bright and wonderful. Like Tsiolkovsy and Zander they dreamed of space flight even whilst Stalin purged the country and sent many of them, including Korolyov, to labour camps in Siberia.
Tortured at the Lubyanka prison, Korolyov (who seems to me to have been something of a workaholic) confessed to slowing the work of the research institute, in return for which he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. One of the men who had denounced Korolyov was Valentin Glushko who would go on to become one of Korolyov's main rivals, and for the rest of his life, Korolyov bore Glushko a grudge (who can blame him?). Korolyov was convinced at the time that his arrest had been a mistake and he wrote many letters trying to persuade the authorities of his innocence. Eventually this bore fruit for the dreaded NKVD head Lavrenti Beria ordered a retrial and Korolyov received a reduced sentence which allowed him to serve his time in a special science and research camp. Such are the joys of communism.
Korolyov had suffered greatly in Sibera. He'd lost his teeth and his health would never fully recovered. Furthermore, almost every one he'd worked with in the Jet Propulsion Research Institute had been executed or disappeared in Siberia. He returned to work though, designing and building bombers for the war which had broken out after Adolf Hitler invaded Germany. Its another great irony of Korolyov's life that he worked so hard for the people who caused him so much suffering, whilst the people he laboured against would be the catalyst for his greatest triumph, for when the Second World War was winding down, Korolyov was suddenly given the rank of a Colonel and sent to Germany to loot the German V2 rocket programme. Russia had had parity with Germany in rocketry until Stalin had started murdering any people he deemed a threat, and now the Soviet Union was at pains to regain lost ground
Korolyov and his companions recovered a lot of the work undertaken at Pennemünde by Von Braun, but they failed to get the main German scientists, most of whom had prudently surrendered to the USA and been quickly removed from harm, and off to comfortably work for NASA and the US aerospace industry. The Soviets were left with the infrastructure and a lot of second line engineers, but this was more than enough for Korolyov who was finally given the chance to fulfil the GIRD dream and build a genuine space rocket. This he did and an R7 'Semyorka' rocket successfully lifted the tiny Sputnik-1 satellite into orbit on 4th October, 1957.
A lot of historians like to describe Sputnik as beginning the arms race which would characterize the Cold War, but in truth it was Korolyov and the R7 that began the arms race. Whilst the R7 was able to lift Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, its massive payload, far in excess of any previous, or contemporary design meant it was able to carry the Soviet Union's nuclear warheads 8,800 kilometers.
Its a sad legacy for Korolyov. The Soviets used his work for triumphal propaganda whilst denying him any credit. The R7 remains one of the most durable rocket design in history with a number of modern variations, but its use as an ICBM forever taints Korolyov's amazing engineering success.
Sergei Korolyov died on 5th January, 1966 whilst working on the Soviet lunar programme. In 1972, Korolyov's position as chief designer was given to Valentin Glushko, but by then the USA had beaten the Soviets to the moon and the space race was more or less over.
No comments:
Post a Comment