We will conquer the universe

Sergei Korolev’s daughter remembers her father passionately trying to persuade her that there would soon come a time of not just space flights but space traffic — with trains, interplanetary stations, and terminals. She thought it was a far-off fantasy that was impossible to achieve. “I see that you don’t believe me,” Korolev said excitedly, “but it will definitely happen. You will see soon.”

Today, when there is no more euphoria from man’s first attempts to lift off from the earth and make tentative steps into an unknown, mysterious, and boundless universe, Korolev’s words seem to have lost their power of persuasion. Yet, exploration of the distant expanses of outer space continues. The flow of data is becoming more intensive because coming to the fore now are impartiality and analysis, not ideology or propaganda. The conquest of outer space is becoming a more realistic goal of humankind.

This article appears to be somewhat fragmentary because describing Korolev’s life is like writing a multi-volume novel full of drama, tragic turns, and breath-taking plots.

THE LUNAR PROJECT WAS OBLIGATORY WORK, BUT KOROLEV WAS DREAMING OF MARS, VENUS, AND JUPITER

Now that new aspects of the Soviet rocket and spacecraft chief designer’s biography are being uncovered, it is becoming increasingly clear that Korolev was the staunchest supporter of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s dictum: “Humankind will not stay on Earth forever but, in pursuit of light and space, it will first timidly go beyond the bounds of the atmosphere and then will conquer the entire solar system.”

Korolev was the most devoted participant of the exhausting race to become the first to implement Tsiolkovsky’s ideas for the future survival of humankind and those of his prophetic predecessors. The rivalry was so financially and economically draining that it led to global geopolitical changes: the so-called socialist camp disappeared from the world stage.

Korolev devoted his entire life to a single goal: to take the first steps into an unknown abyss that could one day save humankind, and to escape the gravitational field of the earth in a physical and philosophical sense. The earth’s first artificial satellite (1957), the first spacecraft to overpower earth’s gravitation (Ekho-1, 1959), the first man in outer space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961), and the first unmanned probes launched to other planets (Venera-1, 1961; Mars-1, 1962) — all this would have been impossible without his participation.

His American rivals on the other side of the planet were not idle either, bringing the world the first televised picture of the earth taken from outer space (Explorer-6, 1959), the first flight to another planet, and collection of data about it (Mariner-2 to Venus, 1962), the first man on the surface of another celestial body — Neil Armstrong (Apollo-11, 1969). Korolev did not live to see Armstrong’s flight: he died of cancer on Jan. 14, 1966.

The chief designer was also a son of his time. His life bore the scars of the 20th-century’s bitter ideological confrontation that brought with it totalitarian dictatorships, wars, and environmental disasters.

He was a strong personality. He knew how to marshal his inner forces and remember Tsiolkovsky’s prophesy: “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot always live in a cradle. The future will see the colonization of the solar system’s unbounded expanses. And when the Sun cools down, humans will open settlements in other worlds fit to live in.”

AT THE CROSSROADS OF DESTINIES, POLITICAL SYSTEMS, AND GALAXIES

Since rivalry and confrontations are an inevitable condition of movement, history produced two leading symbols of rocket and space technology in an ideologically bipolar world: Wernher von Braun in Germany and later in the US (b. March 23, 1912, in Wirsitz, now Wyrzysk, Poland) and Sergei Korolev in the USSR (b. Jan. 12, 1907, in Zhytomyr).

The USSR had several rocket and missile engineering research and production centers, headed by Valentyn Hlushko, Volodymyr Chelomei, and Mikhail Yangel. A similar situation existed in the US, where for a long time von Braun was allowed to deal only with short-range rockets and missiles, while the main burden was shouldered by naval rocket scientists. (It is thought, with good reason, that if the US had more actively implemented Braun’s proposals, the Americans would have launched the first earth satellite and the first astronaut before the USSR.)

By all accounts, the two scientists never met, but von Braun became the target of Korolev’s animosity, fueled by the Kremlin’s ideology. For ethical reasons, I will not quote here the abusive words of the leading Soviet designer, which his contemporaries are now publishing. Korolev was not just a genius. He was, to use a catch phrase, a man of the future. The scale of his personality and devotion to his life goal militate against the use of low expressions. His complex relationships with his wives, daughters, and colleagues are an exclusively personal matter.

Korolev was born to highly-educated parents. His father graduated from the Nizhyn Institute of History and Philology, and his mother, the intellectual and beautiful Maria Moskalenko, was an alumna of the Nizhyn Classical School. The Korolevs lived alternately in Kyiv and Odesa. The marriage was an unhappy one, so Sergei, on whom his maternal grandmother doted, was raised in his mother’s Nizhyn-based family.

The future rocket designer studied at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and later at the Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow. His diploma supervisor was the well-known aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev. In the early 1930s Korolev helped design cruise missiles with a gyro autopilot and a gyro command system of guidance. These missiles were fitted with engines designed by Valentyn Hlushko. The first tragic turn in Korolev’s destiny was connected with this prominent figure of Soviet space exploration.

In 1938 Hlushko and Korolev, as well as some of their colleagues and associates, were unlawfully repressed. Korolev slaved in Siberia’s gold mines and consequently hated gold for the rest of his life.

Contradictory data from those times do not reveal any secrets of the Korolev-Hlushko relationship, but it is a proven fact that they could not cooperate normally and ultimately had a complete falling out.

Both Korolev and Hlushko were among those who stressed the importance of tackling problems of scientific and technological progress. This was also the viewpoint of the contemporary Soviet intellectual, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who did his best to support the development of aviation and rocketry. After Tukhachevsky was done away with, both of the marshal’s young followers fell victim to Stalin’s totalitarian juggernaut of violence.

Nor was Korolev happy in his marriage to the Odesa beauty Oksana Vincentini. He remained lonely even after he remarried.

In her book Otets [Father] the chief designer’s daughter, Natalia Koroleva, described a dramatic relationship with Korolev, who was the dearest person in her life. Whenever she, a young and uncompromising defender of her mother, did not answer the phone, her father cried out of despair and helplessness.

By all accounts, Korolev may be categorized as a pragmatic technocrat, all the more so as his passion for constantly improving all systems of control and his fanatical demand that everything be done the way he wanted (because it was right!) was part of his strivings toward achieving the noble goal of conquering outer space, which one day would save humankind.

But fate decreed that Korolev be born in Ukraine, and he could not rid himself of the “rudiments” of our unique national character, such as dreaminess, romanticism, and the ability always to be in love.

When his daughter turned 18, he told her, “Always love your people and the land that raised you.” It is no accident that even now Ukraine and our songs continue to live in the Korolevs’ Moscow apartment and that the chief designer’s descendants are extremely moved whenever they enter houses associated with his name. This is a natural feature called heredity.

For Korolev, ideology existed on the level of declarations that, clearly, he had to pronounce. His hostility to von Braun was an adverse reaction to a happier rival in the competition for the heart of the most fastidious lady — victory.

Baron von Braun, who had been obsessed with the idea of flights to Mars since childhood, was indifferent to the Nazi regime — he even called Hitler an imbecile within his narrow circle of friends — and all that was related to it: formal Nazi party membership, military ranks, etc. Meanwhile, Korolev was a member of the Communist Party and wore epaulets with big stars. The key difference was that von Braun had to serve just a short prison term for his refusal to cooperate with Himmler, while Korolev had to endure inhumane brutalities in Stalinist dungeons.

Both designers died of cancer. When Korolev was undergoing his final operation, the doctors could not administer anesthesia because the Soviet Union’s most prominent rocket scientist had had his jaws broken during his imprisonment and could barely open his mouth. Incidentally, his tormentor, an investigator named Shestakov, lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union and enjoyed a handsome “well-deserved” pension as a retired colonel.

Korolev sincerely believed that we are not alone in the universe. He even sent an expedition led by the future cosmonaut Heorhii Hrechko to the site of the Tunguska event [an explosion that occurred near the Tunguska River in what is now Russia’s Krasnoyarsk Krai, on June 30, 1908, sometimes referred to as the Great Siberian Explosion — trans.] When Hrechko cheerfully said on the phone that the expedition had found nothing, Korolev ordered him to continue “searching for the wreckage of a spaceship.”

THE MOON REDUX AND RENEWED COMPETITION OF THE TWO SUPERPOWERS

Since the days when the US triumphantly conquered the moon, the earth’s natural satellite has had a low profile as an object of space exploration — at least in comparison with a few decades ago.

The race to the moon between the US and the USSR ended in the compelling victory of the former. Twelve American astronauts visited the moon, enriching science with valuable research material.

All that the USSR (or rather, the party leaders) could do was issue some propagandistic statements, “the most interesting” of which was that the Soviet Union had never developed a lunar project because other programs were more important, etc.

The deceptive nature of this statement is confirmed by the information that the Russian Federation, the USSR’s successor, is today ambitiously announcing the comeback of these unrealized lunar projects. Russia has plans to establish a stationary base on the moon by the year 2015 and to draft a project to transport helium-4 to earth. (This isotope is a highly effective and environmentally-friendly fuel for thermonuclear power plants. The moon has a deposit of at least one million tons. This supply can meet the requirements of generating energy for the earth for a millennium or longer.) Yet, managers of the Russian space rocket corporation Energia say nothing about the sources of funding these grandiose plans.

Meanwhile, NASA has announced a number of lunar expeditions in 2018-20, which will last from a few weeks to six months.

These are interesting announcements, although it is clear that there will no longer be any competition for the successful conquest of outer space: there is too great a difference in the economic — and hence scientific — potentials of the two countries. There have also been reports about the lunar plans of other countries, including China, which has been successfully conducting its own space program in the past decade.

Korolev made a tremendous contribution to the Soviet lunar project, although his heart was not really in it. Vasilii Mishin, Korolev’s successor as the head of the Soviet space program, claims that the chief designer never made any public statements about lunar programs — journalists did it for him. Obviously, Korolev realistically assessed the financial capabilities of the USSR and the US. The Americans spent 40 billion dollars on flights to the moon.

The older generation remembers the Khrushchev era, when the USSR was purchasing grain in Canada and the US for gold, when there were empty shelves in stores and lines for almost every kind of goods.

To the Americans, Gagarin’s space flight came like a bolt out of the blue. It is this event that gave birth to many super-projects the results of which we are applying today without thinking about historical roots: computers, the Internet, etc.

The USSR’s space success (thanks, above all, to Korolev) stunned US leaders. President John Kennedy publicly said that the US would bring its lunar project to fruition and land its astronaut on the earth’s natural satellite by the end of the 1960s.

Aware of the heavy financial burden of this ambitious project, Kennedy suggested at the UN that the US and the USSR work together and launch a joint lunar expedition. When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed on the moon, they hoisted the US flag and placed a plaque with a message from the world that they had come to the moon in peace. As a politician, Kennedy could not help giving an ideological appraisal of the event, declaring that America had won the space race and would therefore win the Cold War.

It is a proven fact that no one in the USSR, except for the leadership, knew this. The Communist Party strictly doled out information and chose what the Soviet people should or should not know. Neither were the directors and participants of the Soviet space programs informed of this.

Nevertheless, Nikita Khrushchev’s assignment had to be carried out: a Soviet man was supposed to land on the moon on the 50th anniversary of the Soviet power. It was necessary do something concrete to show the advantages of socialism over capitalism.

Khrushchev ordered Korolev and his colleagues to create a manned military orbital station armed with nuclear weapons targeting the US. This station was supposed to be permanently suspended above Washington and New York.

Thank God, none of Khrushchev’s bizarre ideas were implemented. The lunar program was phased out, too, because of failed test launches of the rockets that were supposed to transport Soviet cosmonauts (including Aleksei Leonov, the world’s first spacewalker) to the moon. It is fair to say that the Americans also had a lot of problems. Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee died during a test of the Apollo spaceship. But von Braun saw to it that the US lunar project was a success: his rockets proved to be up to the mark.

There were many factors behind the Soviet Union’s failures — both subjective (incompetent interference of Party and state bodies into the space sector, lack of coordination between directors of the Soviet space rocket sector and thus uncoordinated actions, etc.) and objective — above all, financial ones.

I conclude this article with two quotations and brief comments to them.

“On a rainy July morning in 1969, when I was standing at Cape Canaveral, seeing off the Apollo-II designed to take astronauts to the moon and ensure the first moon walk, I was thinking about Yurii Kondratiuk, a unique and outstanding personality. If not for him, mankind would have hung around near-earth orbits for decades, unable to make headway. He deserves the most grateful memory of his contemporaries and descendants,” said the top NASA engineer, Dr. John Houbolt, who defended “Kondratiuk’s lunar track” in a dispute with the omnipotent von Braun, who suggested a different way to launch the US lunar expedition. In the late 1920s, Kondratiuk had proposed a flight to the moon, involving a lunar module with an astronaut on board landing on the moon and then returning to the mother ship that remains in orbit.

Assisting Houbolt in implementing the US lunar program were Michael Yarymovych and Ihor Bohachewsky, two Ukrainian-born NASA specialists.

So is it correct to say that Ukrainians have nothing to do with the successful lunar project?

Astronautics knows no state or national borders, for it is about all of mankind and its future survival.

Kondratiuk, Bohachevsky, and Yarymovych — each of these men could repeat the words of Korolev, “It is better to flare up brightly and burn out than smolder slowly and dully.”

Today, on his 100th anniversary, Korolev convinces us through the example of his short life that his words were correct.