Sergei Korolev

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev is born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. A fascination with aviation seizes him young; he designs gliders as a student.

The Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD) forms in Moscow with Korolev among its leaders; volunteers joke that GIRD means 'group of engineers working for nothing'. In 1933 they fly the first Soviet liquid-fuel rocket, GIRD-09.

Stalin's purges sweep through the aviation and rocketry institutes: Korolev, Glushko, Tupolev and countless engineers are arrested. The Soviet space programme is founded, in part, by men who first met in prison.

Denounced on testimony that included Glushko's, extracted under interrogation three months earlier while Glushko was himself in custody, Korolev is arrested and tortured, according to later accounts with a broken jaw, and after sentencing sent on to Kolyma, the Gulag's deadliest region.

Caught in the purges, Glushko is imprisoned; interrogation extracts testimony implicating Korolev. The two men will work together for decades under the shadow of that betrayal.

Near death in Kolyma, Korolev is transferred to a prison design bureau (sharashka) under Tupolev, then to Glushko's rocket-engine sharashka, the men who will build Soviet space met as prisoners.

As the Reich collapses, Soviet and American teams race to seize V-2 hardware, blueprints and engineers. Korolev and Glushko are sent to Germany in uniform to reconstruct the missile.

In colonel's uniform, Korolev is sent to occupied Germany to study captured V-2 hardware, the technology he will surpass.

Stalin signs decree no. 1017-419ss creating NII-88 and the network of design bureaux, with a special committee for rocket technology and a new firing range. The decree does not name Korolev; he heads the long-range missile department at NII-88 in Kaliningrad (later Korolyov), near Moscow.

Appointed chief designer of long-range ballistic missiles, Korolev builds the bureau (OKB-1, later Energia) in Kaliningrad near Moscow that will produce Sputnik, Vostok and Soyuz.

From 1951 Chertok leads control-systems design for Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz and the stations, at the technical heart of every mission.

From the new Kapustin Yar range, the R-1, a reverse-engineered V-2, flies. The copy is the school; from it Korolev's bureau will grow the R-7 that opens space.

Korolev's identity is a state secret; he signs public articles as 'Professor K. Sergeev'. The Nobel Committee reportedly asks who should be credited for Sputnik; Khrushchev answers: 'the whole Soviet people'.

Korolev's R-7 puts the first satellite in orbit. He is celebrated as the anonymous 'Chief Designer'; the state forbids naming him, fearing assassination.