Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Sergei Korolev: The Most Important Russian You've Never Heard Of

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

In the early 1960’s the Soviet space program was on a roll. They launched the first satellite into space. They launched the first man and woman into space. They conducted the first space walk.  Then, around 1966, everything changed.  The momentum they had ground to a halt, and the Americans quickly surpassed them in the space race.  What happened? Learn more about Sergei Korolev, the most important Russian you probably have never heard of, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox ButcherBox is offering our listeners turkey FREE in your first box plus $20 off your first order. Sign up at butcherbox.com/daily and use code DAILY Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet space program was on a role. They launched the first satellite into space. They launched the first man and woman into space. And they conducted the first spacewalk. Then around 1966, everything changed. The momentum they had ground to a halt, and the Americans quickly surpassed them in the space race. What happened? Learn more about Sergei Korolev, the most important Russian you probably have never heard of,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. There was probably nothing more emblematic of the Cold War than the space race. It was a peaceful competition where the United States.

States and the Soviet Union attempted to show that their system was superior through accomplishments in spaceflight. It was a competition that, at least at first, the Soviets had a commanding lead. They managed to launch the first artificial satellite into orbit, Sputnik won in October of 1957. They launched the first living thing into orbit, a dog named Lyca just a month later. The dog, unfortunately, went on a planned one-way trip. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space when he made an orbit of the Earth and safely return. turned. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she orbited the earth 48 times in 1963. In 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first human to exodus space capsule and conduct a

spacewalk. These were all very impressive accomplishments, even more so when viewed through the lens of the Cold War and the space race. In these first years of the space race, the United States constantly found themselves coming up second and getting one-upped by the Soviets. The American Space Program was extremely open, including all of their successes and failures. The brains behind the American Space Program was a German rocket engineer named Verner von Braun. Everybody knew who Verner von Brown was. He was on the cover of Time and Life magazines. He conducted TV interviews. Likewise, NASA was a public government agency that had congressional hearings, publicly available budget data, and public-facing administrators. The Soviet space program, on the other hand, was a

complete mystery. Nobody knew who ran it or who their equivalent of Werner von Brown was. This was by design. The head of the Soviet space program was such a closely held secret that most people who worked in the Soviet space program, including many cosmonauts, had no clue who the leader was. So if you've never heard of Sergei Korolev before, it isn't necessarily out of ignorance on your part. It has to do with the fact that for years his identity was kept a secret. Sergei Korolev was born in 1907 in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today the nation of Ukraine. He was Russian and Belarusian on his father's side and German Greek on his mother's side.

Soon after his birth, his mother and father separated, and Sergei was told that his father had died, not knowing that he was actually alive until 1929. His early life was very hard. His grandparents raised him in Kiev, an only child with few friends. He was seven when the First World War began, and he was largely ignored with everything going on about him. His mother remarried a German engineer in 1916, who moved the family to Odessa. His stepfather was a positive influence on Sergei, who was able to teach him math and science, which became especially important after the communist revolution when schools were shut down.

After visiting an aviation show in 1913, he took an interest in aviation, which spurred his own independent study of the subject. In Odessa in 1923 at the age of 16, he joined the Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation of Ukraine and the Crimea. He took flying lessons and at the age of 17, he actually built his own glider. In 1924, he enrolled in the Kiev Polytechnic Institute to study aviation. He studied there until he was admitted to the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, where he studied under the great Russian aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev. After graduation, he took a job at the Central Aerohydromynamic Institute.

where he worked on the Tupala T.B3 heavy bomber. He also received his pilot's license and became interested in liquid fuel rockets. In 1931, he and several other rocket enthusiasts established the group for the study of reactive motion, known as Grid in Russian, the first formal institute for rocket development in the Soviet Union. In 1932, he was appointed the head of Grid and quickly saw several successes. In August 1933, they launched their first hybrid solid liquid propellant rocket, and in November, they launched their first totally liquid-fueled rocket. The group was merged with a military research group working on similar projects in 1934 to create the reactive scientific research institute or RNII in Russian.

He was originally appointed the deputy director of the institute, but after disagreeing with the direction the institute was going, he saw a series of demotions. Everything I've described up until this point kind of sounds like the resume of someone who may go on to lead a space program. However, in 1937, events unfolded that took his life in a totally different direction. In 1937, Stalin's purges were targeted at the RNIII. The director and associate director of the institute were arrested, tortured, forced to sign false confessions, and executed. Sergei himself was arrested in 1938 after someone in the RNII named him in one of the confessions extracted by torture.

He was also denounced by Andrei Kostakov, the man who became the director of the institute after the leadership had been purged. Sergei Korlov was tortured and sent to prison. He pleaded his case with several Communist Party officials, even sending a letter to Stalin himself. In 1939, Levrenti Beria, truly one of the worst people in human history, rose to become the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He decided to retry Korolev on lesser charges, but by that time, Korolev had been sent to a gulag in eastern Siberia. While in the gulag, he probably suffered a heart attack and lost his teeth due to scurvy. In 1939, he was brought back to Moscow for retrial and was sentenced to eight years in prison. His mentor, Andrei Tupilov, got him assigned to a special prison for scientists and

engineers, which was an actual thing in the Soviet Union. In the scientist prison during the war, he was moved multiple times to avoid being captured by the Germans, and he constantly lived with the fear of being executed so his knowledge wouldn't fall into German hands. In 1944, he and other scientists were allowed to leave the prison, and in 1945 he was made a colonel in the Red Army. In the Army, he worked on rockets for the military, for which he was given an award, and perhaps most importantly, he was given the task of recovering all of the German V2 rocket program in PM1D Germany after the Soviets captured it. While most of the top German rocket scientists fled to be captured by the Americans, the Soviets got the actual facility and all of the

rockets. In 1946, Stalin made rocket and missile development a top priority for the country, and established the Scientific Research Institute number 88. Sergei Korlov, formerly one of Stalin's prisoners in a gulag, was appointed the chief designer of long-range missiles. His first job was to reassemble as many V2 rockets as possible. He thought it was pointless in that they should be working on their own rocket, but he was overruled and reassembling the V2s is what he did. In 1948, his request to make a new rocket was approved,

and he began work on what was dubbed the R2. It was based on the V2, but it had twice the range. This was then followed by the R3, which had a range of 3,000 kilometers or 1900 miles, which was long enough to hit England. Korolev continued working on the R series of rockets, eventually designing the R7, which was the world's first true intercontinental ballistic missile.

The design of the R7 began in 1954. Korolev was well aware of the potential of spaceflight, as he had known some of the earliest Russian spaceflight theorists. Just six days after the commission of the R7, Korolev asked permission to use the R7 to launch a satellite into space. The Soviet authorities, now without the burden of Joseph Stalin, weren't interested. So he and other Soviet engineers began to submit articles to Soviet newspapers about the potential of spaceflight.

These articles were then picked up by the Americans, who used them as evidence that the Soviets were working on launching a satellite into orbit, which in turn spurred President Eisenhower to announce the goal of launching a satellite into orbit in 1955. Corlev then used the U.S. interest in satellites to spur Soviet interest in beating the Americans to space. In 1957, he asked the Soviet Central Committee for permission to launch a satellite, and because nobody wanted to be the one to lose to the Americans, Korolev got his wish. Needless to say, it was a massive public relations coup for the Soviets,

one of their biggest accomplishments ever. Many of the senior Soviet officials who were ambivalent about space were now all in. Korolev formerly got his crimes under Stalin expunged, and the former criminal in the eyes of the state was now a national hero. Except for one thing. For security reasons, the name of the chief Soviet rocket designer was kept a secret. When Korolev's team published a recap of the Sputnik mission in the Pravda newspaper, it was published under the pseudonym Professor K. Sergeyev. Korolev had big ideas. He felt the R7 was powerful enough to launch a payload to the moon.

In 1958, he got approval and after a series of failures, managed to launch the first payload out of the gravitational well of Earth and into the orbit of the sun. Actually, it was an accident because they were actually trying to hit the moon and missed. Eventually, however, the Soviets did take the first picture of the dark side of the moon and made the first flyby of Mars. The Soviet Space Program also had a host of other successes that I previously listed. Corlev was the guiding force of the entire Soviet Space Program, but no one, even inside the

space program, knew his actual name. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov said, quote, Long before we met him, one man dominated much of our conversation in the early days of our training, Sergei Pavlovich Korolov, the mastermind behind the Soviet Space Program. He was only ever referred to by the initial. initials of his first two names, SP, or by the mysterious title, Chief Designer, or simply Chief. For those in the space program, there was no authority higher. End quote. Korolev's health began to decline in 1960 when he had a heart attack. He had kidney problems

that came from his time in the gulog. He developed intestinal bleeding in 1962 and also had issues with his gallbladder. In January 1966, he entered the hospital for surgery and died on the operating table on January 14th at the age of 59. There's been a great deal of mysteries surrounding his death. Some say that he had an undiagnosed tumor in his intestine, and other biographer said that he actually went in for a hemorrhoid operation. On January 16th, just two days after his death, the Soviet public and the rest of the world were finally told the identity

of the mastermind of the Soviet space program. His ashes were interred in the walls of the Kremlin where they remain today. Sergei Korolev had big plans. He envisioned orbiting space stations and putting a man on the moon. And many people think that if he had lived, the Soviets could have beaten the Americans to the moon. However, it's highly unlikely. The rocket that Korolev had commissioned before he died, the N1 never worked. Unlike the enormous F1 engines in the American Saturn 5, the N1 required 42 smaller engines,

which had many more points of failure. Almost all of the Soviet achievements in space were based on the success of the R7 family of rockets. Derivatives of that rocket first launched in 1957 are still being used today by the Russian space program, even though they now go by different names. Nonetheless, the accomplishments of Sergei Korlov can't be understated. He was responsible for most of the major first in spaceflight, and for that reason alone his name should be remembered. Even if no one knew his name, when he was.

actually alive. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review is a boostogram sent by Stelio 91 on the fountain app. They sent a thousand sats and the following message. I have now unlocked the Albanian chapter of the Completionist Club. Thank you, Gary, for the array of topics and information you sprinkle into my morning drive. Looking forward to tomorrow's episode already.

Thalimendar it. Thanks, Stelio. I'm glad to hear there's now a Completionist Club chapter in Albania. I visited Albania a few years ago on a road trip I made through the Balkans, and I enjoyed my time in Tirana. It is definitely on my list of places to return to. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read on the show.