Russia kicks off big year for space history

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

Russian space enthusiasts are kicking off a year of major anniversaries on Friday with ceremonies marking the centenary of the birth of Sergei Korolyov, the founder of the Soviet space program and quite possibly the man most responsible for sparking the “space race.”

September brings the 150th anniversary of the birth of pioneering spaceflight theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. And the year's biggest celebrations center on Oct. 4, the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik — arguably the greatest achievement of Korolyov and his team.

Next week, Russia’s first space shot of 2007, a routine supply mission to the international space station, will carry Korolyov’s name — and a painted portrait on its external payload faring — into space. It's yet another public honor for a man who could enjoy no such honors while he was alive.

Korolyov has always been less well known than Western space pioneers such as Wernher von Braun because his identity was kept secret during his lifetime. His untimely death in 1966 took the wind out of the sails of the Soviet space program, and myths and half-truths have been wrapped around his name ever since.

Space disasters and Moscow's ultimate defeat in the race to the moon were ascribed to the absence of his magical leadership, although more cynical historians have suggested that he died at the just the right time to preserve his reputation — before mounting technical challenges, probably beyond even his skills to overcome, erased the Soviets' lead in the space race.

King of the Soviet space effort
"Korolyov" (or, in an alternate transliteration of the Russian, "Korolev") is a fairly common Russian name. It's derived from a word for "king," or "Carol" as in Charlemagne. In Russian, the name is pronounced "ka-rall-YOFF," although some at NASA insist on saying "ka-ROLL-ee-yeff."

The man who would ultimately carry the title "Chief Designer of Space Vehicles" was born into a teacher’s family in Zhitomir, now in the independent Ukraine (where festivities are also scheduled). At the age of 5, he saw his first airplane — and from then on, flight was the only career on his mind.

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bAs a youth in Odessa he studied engineering and took part in aviation clubs. Later, he designed and flew his own glider. In Moscow he attended Russia’s top engineering school, and on the side began working on small rockets with a team of fellow enthusiasts. When the Soviet military leadership began providing funds, Korolyov’s group was delighted — but then the paranoid purges began in the mid-1930s, most members of the team were imprisoned, and many were shot.

He survived the imprisonment, including a usually fatal assignment to the infamous Kolyma gold fields in eastern Siberia, and was eventually rehabilitated. After World War II he resumed his leadership of the Soviet rocket program.

Korolyov’s strengths, fueled by his lifelong devotion to flight and eventually spaceflight, were his engineering intuition and his organizational skills. He assembled a group of specialists in propulsion, structures, communications and control systems — at first, to test captured German V-2 rockets, then to build a copy and later an improved version, then build a series of more and more powerful military missiles. But there always was an office in his factories, staffed by surviving enthusiasts from his original team in the 1930s, devoted to dreaming about outer space.

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