Portal:Spaceflight/Selected biography/February 2008

Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov (often transliterated as Sergei Korolev), (Серге́й Па́влович Королёв; Сергій Павлович Корольов), (12 January 1907, Zhytomyr – 14 January 1966, Moscow), was the head Soviet rocket engineer and designer during the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although trained as an aircraft designer, Korolyov's greatest strengths proved to be in design integration, organization and strategic planning. A victim of Stalin's 1938 Great Purge, he was imprisoned for almost six years, including some months in a Siberian gulag. Following his release, he became a rocket designer and a key figure in the development of the Soviet ICBM programme. He was then appointed to lead the Soviet space programme, overseeing the early successes of the Sputnik and Vostok projects. By the time he died unexpectedly in 1966, his plans to compete with the United States to be the first nation to land a man on the Moon had begun to be implemented.

Before his death, he was often referred to only as "Chief Designer", because his pivotal role in the Soviet space program had been held to be a state secret by the Politburo. (more...)