Space-age secrets revealed 50 years later

Unsung Soviet hero
For Korolyov there was bitterness as well as triumph. He was never mentioned in any contemporary accounts of the launch, and his key role was known to only a few officials and space designers.

Leonid Sedov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences with no connection to space program, was erroneously touted in the West as the Father of Sputnik. Korolyov, meanwhile, was only allowed to publish his non-sensitive research under the pseudonym "Professor K. Sergeyev."

Khrushchev rejected the Nobel committee's offer to nominate Korolyov for a prize, insisting that it was the achievement of "the entire Soviet people."

Sergei Khrushchev said his father thought singling out Korolyov would anger other rocket designers and hamper the missile and space programs.

"These people were like actors; they would all have been madly jealous at Korolyov," he said. "I think my father's decision was psychologically correct. But, of course, Sergei Korolyov felt deeply hurt."

Korolyov's daughter, Natalia, recalled in a book that the veil of secrecy vexed her father. "We are like miners —`we work underground," she recalls him saying. "No one sees or hears us."

The Soviet Union and the rest of the world learned Korolyov's name only after his death in 1966. Today his Moscow home, where Chertok met reporters, is a museum in the chief scientist's honor.

Chertok was permitted to travel abroad only in the late 1980s, after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev liberalized the Soviet Union.

The surviving leaders of the space program are no longer anonymous or silent, and revel in the accolades so long denied them.

"The rivalry in space, even though it had military reasons, has pushed the mankind forward," said Valery Korzun, a cosmonaut who serves as a deputy chief of the Star City cosmonaut training center. "Our achievements today are rooted in that competition."

In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, nearly 12 years later. Khrushchev wasn't interested in getting there, his son says, and the effort made under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was underfunded and badly hampered by rifts between Korolyov and other designers.

"We wouldn't have been the first on the moon anyway," Grechko said. "We lost the race because our electronics industry was inferior."

Today, even as Sputnik recedes into the history books, its memory still exercises a powerful grip. In August, when a Russian flag was planted on the sea bed at the North Pole, the Kremlin compared it to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon — an indication, perhaps, of how much Russians still treasure that first victory in space.

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