It all started with Tsiolkovsky
who was like Jules Verne but could do the math.
He worked it all out on paper, predicted everything.

We started building rockets in a basement,
a Moscow basement.
No one was hurt, no one was ever burned.

Twice they tried to erase me
just on the brink
of something.

I contributed in my way, even as some of these bastards
tried to kill me. That's in the past, that was a mistake.
But sometimes I catch myself eating every last crumb.
Eating hard and fast.

Twice they tried to erase me
the first time before the war.
Now again they try to erase me
just on the brink
of something.

Now I can see we reached the apogee too fast
the trajectory is wrong, the telemetry is bad.
That smiling young man who slept peacefully
on his way out to the pad, on his way into space,
was a postscript to our satellite.

I like a rocket okay...
but what I really like
is what's on it.




Chief Designer Sergey Korolev became interested in aviation as a child. As a teenager he attended a building trades school and after the October Revolution was trained as an aircraft designer. Korolev was a key figure in an amateur rocketry club in the early 30’s in Moscow, a club that included many of the future technical leaders of the space program. Like many of his colleagues Korolev fell victim to Stalin’s purges in the late 30’s, and spent time in one of the worst prison camps in the Soviet far east. His health was severely damaged during this period. During WWII, in spite of the fact he was still officially an “enemy of the state,” Korolev worked as a designer of military rocket aircraft and other weapons systems.

A brilliant engineer and organizer, Korolev was famous for his terrible temper and personal pessimism, unshakable loyalty to subordinates, and inspirational if tempestuous leadership. Throughout his life he found himself entangled in endless battles with the Soviet political bureaucracy who he felt were constantly mis-directing resources and obstructing the real scientific potential of the space program for short term propaganda gains or as a result of bureaucratic turf battles. Korolev had charted a comprehensive organizational and technical plan for Soviet manned space flight that he believed, given sufficient resources, would have made a manned mission to mars possible by the early 1970's.

After many years of ill health, partly the result of his imprisonment and exhausting work schedule, Sergey Korolev died in January 1966, as the result of complications following cancer surgery. He was 59.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an eccentric, self-taught school teacher, is widely considered the father of theoretical astronautics. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Tsiolkovsky elaborated a vision of human exploration of the cosmos and also developed the mathematical tools of astronautics that are still in use today. Korolev and his contemporaries viewed their work as the implementation of Tsiolkovsky’s vision of manned space travel as an exciting and inevitable step forward in humanity's quest to explore and understand the universe.

Sergey Korolev is pictured above in 1954 with a dog who had just returned from a sub-orbital flight.