Sergei Korolev

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

Boris Chertok, an electrical engineer, joins the aviation industry and then, after the war, Korolev's rocket team as a specialist in guidance and control.

Vladimir Chelomei is born in what is now Poland; a brilliant mechanician, he will build the design bureau that rivals Korolev's.

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.

He dies a Soviet hero, his birthday later marking Cosmonautics Day festivities. His ideas pass to a generation of engineers, Korolev among them, who will make them real.

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 (his enemies would later include Glushko, whose testimony was extracted under interrogation), Korolev is arrested, tortured, his jaw broken, and sent 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.

Chertok runs the Institute RABE in occupied Germany, gathering V-2 documentation and engineers, the raw material of the Soviet programme, and there first meets Korolev.

Stalin signs the decree creating NII-88 and the network of design bureaux. Korolev is named chief designer of long-range missiles at OKB-1 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.

For nearly three decades 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.