ZHYTOMYR, Ukraine — The warm morning of April 12, 1961, brought quite a spectacle to the small village of Smelovka on the left bank of the Volga River in then-Soviet Russia.
The locals noticed a suspicious man tottering through a crop field nearby, with a giant parachute left behind in the dirt. Dressed in something like an orange diver suit, the stranger was holding a white helmet under his arm.
He seemed to have fallen from the sky. Townsfolk first believed he was an American spy or something.
But the intruder, his exhausted face pulsing red, was speaking pure Russian. Breathing heavily, he asked that the villagers help him get in contact with the military.
Left in the field was a monstrous hollow sphere of scorched metal raided by curious kids.
Meanwhile, front pages around the world were roaring in all bold fonts. Soviet pilot Yuriy Gagarin has become the first human in outer space. He orbited the Earth with a Vostok 1 capsule and landed safely in southwest Russia 108 minutes after the launch.
Once again, American pride sustained a blow.
A New York Times front page dated April 12, 1961, reporting on Yuriy Gagarin’s spaceflight.
The Soviets won the contest to complete the greatest journey of all time, having edged out their Cold War rival by just three weeks. Hailed by monarchs and presidents, Gagarin, a smiley 27-year-old, gained lasting global fame.
Fewer people knew the true mastermind behind this triumph: Serhiy Korolyov.
He was the Soviet space program’s chief designer, a Ukrainian from Zhytomyr, the provincial capital of 266,000 people located 133 kilometers west of Kyiv.
Thanks to his selfless genius, the Soviets gained many firsts in the Space Race. But the world only came to know his name after his unexpected death in 1966.
Exactly 60 years ago, Korolyov’s dream of a lifetime came true: He saw one of his beloved “baby falcons,” as he called his young cosmonauts, go beyond the sky by a Vostok rocket of his design.
But his path to the day of all days was as painful as it could be. Today, the museum of his legacy bears the Latin phrase “Per aspera ad astra” (“through hardships to the stars”) — the sad though inspiring illustration of his life.
Before he sent Gagarin to the stars, Korolyov had gone through the hell and humiliation of the Soviet Gulag, the bitterness of being hidden from global peers — and also through hope and poetic love to science that made him a founding father of astronautics revered even today.
A guide demonstrates a full-size spacecraft model exhibited at the Serhiy Korolyov Space Exploration Museum in Zhytomyr on April 8, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
‘A winged machine’
Serhiy Korolyov (alternatively spelled as Sergey Korolev after Russian pronunciation) was born in 1907 to the middle-class family of a Russian language teacher in a modest one-story house in Zhytomyr.
The house, with its generic early 20th-century furniture and striped wallpapers, remains a memorial historic site.
“We always jokingly recommend that our visitors make a wish here,” says Iryna Vyshnevetska, the museum guide.
“A star was born here.”
His upbringing was rough, so he ended up living with his grandparents in Nizhyn, the city of 68,000 people located 120 kilometers northeast of Kyiv.
His destiny arrived on a sunny day in June 1911. Sergey Utochkin, a Russian aeronautics enthusiast, came to the town to show off the miracle of early airplanes.
A view to a living room in a house that used to be rented by the Korolyov family in 1906, now a museum in Zhytomyr, pictured on April 8, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
The 5-year-old Korolyov was stunned: A winged, roaring machine took a man up in the air to fly.
Novelty aviation and engineering became his obsession. He studied thick physics textbooks and tried to hang out with aviators and enthusiasts.
He dreamed of building his own aircraft one day. He indeed designed a full-fledged unpowered glider K-5 that was officially recognized eligible for production — and he was only 17 then.
Buried in drawing sheets and airplane models, he enrolled in Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, which today takes pride in having him as its former student.
While many in Moscow have tried to claim him as a Russian, Korolyov was crystal clear about his identity — in a student inquiry form dated 1925, the future great engineer answered his ethnicity as Ukrainian.
“Yes, he loved Ukraine all his life,” says museum guide Vyshnevetska. “And he knew lots of our old folk songs.”
Ukraine was associated with the happiest moments of his life. It was on the rooftop of the Odesa Medical University that Korolyov had his first kiss with his future wife, surgeon Ksenia Vintsentini.
And it was in Kyiv that Korolyov took off in the air by himself for the first time, driving self-made gliders with fellow dreamers of early aviation.
Later on, he zealously gave every minute possible to engineering.
A museum guide demonstrates old pictures and documents of Serhiy Korolyov’s life at the Space Exploration Museum in Zhytomyr on April 8, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
One day at a university classroom in Moscow, Korolyov was chalking a novelty aircraft design on a blackboard when he felt someone trampling his foot from behind.
Looking back angrily, Korolyov was stunned to find he was being watched by none other than Andrey Tupolev, an aeronautics legend.
The professor was so impressed that he decided to become Korolyov’s scientific supervisor.
Beyond the atmosphere
At 23, he left his first footprint in the history of aviation: the SK-3 (Serhiy Koroloyov-3) glider became the world’s first engineless aircraft to perform complete looping in 1930. Koroloyov would have piloted it himself, except for a bad case of typhus, so another pilot got the honors.
After university, Koroloyov devoted himself to aerodynamics, calculations, and designs.
Those working today at the museum bearing his name, however, call him nothing but “a poet with slip-stick in his hand.”
A view to the Serhiy Korolyov National Space Exploration Museum main hall in Zhytomyr, pictured on April 8, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
“He loved literature and poetry,” according to Vyshnevetska.
“He had a very poetic, very spiritual attitude toward the sky. He believed that aviation was something of a higher nature, a source of endless inspiration.”
In the early 1930s, Koroloyov became acquainted with the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy, who suggested that humans could overcome the gravitational pull of the Earth. Koroloyov was stunned by the idea of flying without wings beyond the atmosphere.
He immediately joined the ranks of early enthusiasts of rocket science.
“Koroloyov and his friends would build primitive rockets,” says Vyshnevetska.
“And they sometimes had to transport them to launch sites via Moscow public transport. Tram conductors would often yell at them. “What kind of water pipes are you young men trying to take in? You’ve got to pay for extra luggage!”
The industrialized 1930s was also a boom time for militaries.
Koroloyov became a Red Army officer and one of the key engineers of the newly-created Reactive Force Institute in Moscow. He designed new military-grade air defense and ballistic missiles, liquid propellant and solid-fueled.
He dreamed of creating a rocket-powered aircraft potentially able to reach the final frontier before outer space.
The frozen inferno
Then came Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror.
Most of the institute’s leadership had already been arrested in massive purge campaigns. Koroloyov always kept a suitcase in his Moscow apartment in case of arrest.
This happened in June 1938.
Two NKVD operatives spent the night turning the apartment upside down as the family watched helplessly. They took Koroloyov to the Lubyanka prison. Like so many before, he was accused of being a member of a “Trotskyist sabotage group” to derail Soviet military production.
He vehemently refused to confess.
During his first interrogation, an NKVD officer smashed Koroloyov’s jaw with a glass decanter.
Then they started beating him with rubber pipes and spit in his face, calling him “a fascist fag.” The prison guards deprived him of food and sleep.
Serhiy Korolyov’s identity photos taken at the Butyrka jail in Moscow on June 28, 1938. (USSR - Soviet archives)
After three months of torture, a broke Koroloyov finally pleaded guilty.
His name was added to one of numerous, long execution lists signed by Stalin personally.
But in the very final moment, he was among those very few who were excluded from it for some unknown reason.
A troika court hearing that lasted 20 seconds sentenced him to 10 years of hard labor instead. One of the country’s brightest rocket engineers ended up with a spade in his hands at a Gulag gold mine in polar Kolyma.
After less than a year in slavery, sick and exhausted Koroloyov wished for death in frozen barracks. But his family, particularly his mother, spent years pulling strings and seeking mercy.
Koroloyov himself sent letters to Stalin begging to let his criminal case be reconsidered.
Finally, in 1940, his friends among respected military pilots managed to get him transferred back to a Moscow jail. There, the old teacher met his former student: aeronautics legend Tupolev, also a Gulag convict, took him to his sharashka — one of many Soviet prison design bureaus, in which engineers and inventors secretly worked for the military.
This effectively saved Koroloyov’s life.
He was freed only in 1944. The horrific beatings in jail left him unable to fully open his mouth or raise his arms higher than his head.
‘Happy people’
After World War II, Korolyov plunged into a new Soviet missile program, becoming a leader among thousands of engineers trying to counter America’s fleet of nuclear bombers.
Scores of failures and partial successes eventually led him to his first historic milestone — the 1957 inception of the R-7 Semyorka — the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, the modifications of which even today serve as launch vehicles.
But he never stopped dreaming of space.
“Korolyov had a great talent in organizing things and at pushing ideas,” says Vyshnevetska.
“He knew the Soviet system. He knew what to tell the military to wheedle money for projects, how to convince the Soviet leadership that pioneering in space was of great political significance.”
Years of hard work paid off on Oct. 4, 1957, as radio listeners heard the “beep…beep…beep” signal from Sputnik-1, the world’s first satellite.
Humankind’s space era had been opened by someone who once was dying of scurvy in Stalin’s prisons.
Finally, in the early hours of April 12, 1961, the 54-year-old chief designer Korolyov was the one sitting behind the microphone at Baikonur Cosmodrome’s main mission control center to supervise the launch of his Vostok 1 spacecraft.
He had personally kissed Gagarin goodbye near the launch pad following a sleepless night before. Chances were high that he would never see the young pilot again: Among the previous 24 test launches, only 12 were successful.
Chief Constructor Serhiy Korolyov (R) bids the final blessing to cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin (L) hours to the first spaceflight on April 12, 1961. (Mil.ru)
“Preliminary stage… intermediate… main… liftoff!” Korolyov shouted in the microphone at 9.06 a.m. local time as engine exits roared with bursts of fire.
“We wish you a good flight. Everything is all right.”
As the Vostok 1 started slowly propelling up in the sky, Gagarin replied with his legendary “Poyekhali!” (“Let’s roll!”).
The world was stunned again.
The Nobel Prize jury had tried twice to award the mysterious unnamed chief constructor. But on each occasion, the Soviet government declined, saying that the greatest milestones in space “belong to the whole people rather than one man.”
According to his family, Koroloyov resented the official slight and referred to himself and his team as “mine diggers whom the sunlight never reaches.”
He died in early 1966 while preparing new missions to the Moon and Mars, during intestinal canal surgery.
The most experienced Soviet doctors failed to ensure proper anesthesia and inserted an intratracheal tube — due to that old jaw fracture inflicted by NKVD tormentors in 1938.
In an official obituary published on Jan. 16, 1966, Soviet authorities finally disclosed Korolyov’s identity and later acknowledged his leading role in so many space exploration firsts.
“Yes, he was truly one of the greatest scientists of all time,” says Zhytomyr Space Exploration Museum science associate Nataliya Zakrevska.
“And he came this through so much grief and tears. But when I think of the scientists under his lead, I also realize how happy those people were. Their lives were hard, but they selflessly worked for something truly outstanding, thanks to their pure enthusiasm.”
“And Korolyov was a happy man, too, — because in his life, he had literally made his whole way from the very depths to the very stars.”
Pictures showing Serhiy Korolyov and Yuriy Gagarin demonstrated at the Serhiy Korolyov Space Exploration Museum in Zhytomyr on April 8, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
