For a new and different perception of pivotal Soviet events, read on...

A Socialist Moon Program Made by Moscow's Mystery Man

he Kremlin revealed the identity of the Twentieth Century's greatest mystery man only after his death in 1966. Before that, the 'rocket scientist' who kept the Soviet Union ahead of the United States, as well as every other nation on earth, in the quest to explore outer space was know publicly as "The Chief Designer" His very name was a secret whispered among a knowing few.

At mid century Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (pronounced: Kor-ol-YOVh) may have labored in obscurity, but his work had rattled the world awake to the Soviet Union's technological prowess.

The invisible hand of the invisible Soviet spaceman shocked the world when Korolev's team launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957. Sputnik was earth's first artificial satellite. Simple, shiny, and small (22 inches in diameter; 84 kilos=184 lbs.) sphere circled the earth once every 96 minutes, whizzing along at 18,000 mph and most amazingly sending out a battery powered beep-beep-beep as if to announce its presence to earthlings. Sputnik was "really and truly" in the words of America's then leading magazine, "The shot heard round the world."

Sputnik, the polished little metal ball trailing four whip antennas, gave the Kremlin an unanticipated propaganda triumph. The Soviet Union's Communist party boss, Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) recalls in his memoirs a confidential phone call about the successful launch when he blithely thought he was hearing about, "just another Korolev rocket."

The Chief Designer's name, of course, was not then uttered in public-it was a state secret. A very-matter-of fact report in the official party newspaper, Pravda, the next day referred to a single individual, the long dead Kostantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935). The Russian newspaper correctly explained that Sputnik's success had been foreseen by the visionary Tsiolkovsky. In 1903 he had proved the mathematical possibility of earth orbit and how a device launched a specific velocity could achieve it. In fact Tsiolkovsky had planned a moon landing even before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. It was The New York Times labeling the "beep-beep-beeping" orbiting object a propaganda triumph; along with headlines on most every newspaper in the world to drive home to the Kremlin the immensity of the Korolev lead Soviet achievement.

Sputnik marked the precise moment of worldwide recognition that the space age had begun. In the hyper-paranoid Cold War era it did not take a rocket scientist to understand that triumphant delivery of the noisy 'Red moon' into space atop a mighty [Korolev] rocket validated Soviet claims that Communist power had produced the world's first. To the delight of the Soviet military, the same Korolev designed rocket that propelled Sputnik into space had launched a dummy nuclear warhead from Central Asia and landed it thousands of miles away in Kamchatka. Propaganda aside, evidence, in the form of Sputnik, that the Kremlin controlled a booster rocket capable of landing an H-bomb on a distant American city, set off a national security crisis in the United States. Sputnik prompted expressions of insecurity and inadequacy in American society. Panic attacks about a "technological Pearl Harbor" (or a "Cold War Pearl Harbor") were followed by a national soul searching. From pulpits and the press came discussions of 'rocket gaps', 'education gaps' and intelligence failures. Korolev's October surprise prompted warnings inside the country that the American way of life "is doomed to rapid extinction," if the nation's youth did not learn to appreciate the importance of science. In the wake of Sputnik ways of schooling (especially science, math and foreign language study) were overhauled, federal spending on higher education dramatically increased, and Washington authorized the creation of NASA.

Americans who knew nothing of Tsiolkovsky, Soviet scientific tradition or national enthusiasm for aviation triumphs since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 (flying, one expert explained, is a kinetic metaphor for liberation, a revolutionary release from mundane earth-bound realities) had feared that they were being hoodwinked by 'red devils'. Some wanted to hunt out the Communist spies who they claimed had stolen American rocket secrets, in the same way, it was said, they had robbed the wartime Los Alamos nuclear laboratory of plans for the A-bomb. A few scientists speculated that the Soviets were about to stage a spectacular show of intimidation by exploding a hydrogen bomb on the moon's surface during a lunar eclipse. At least one American TV network stayed on the air with live pictures of the moon during the eclipse in case the bomb went off. Other Americans preferred to believe Sputnik was nothing more than a Soviet hoax.

Once Khrushchev realized the incredible public relations coup the "Chief Designer" had handed the Kremlin, he ordered up a repeated performance to coincide with the 40^th anniversary of the Russian revolution. In less than a month Korolev's design team scrambled to meet communism's command. The scientists at Korolev's innocuously named "Design Bureau No.1" rushed to accomplish another world astonishing feat. Another R-7 booster lofted a mixed-breed dog named "Laika"" into Orbit on Sputnik-2. The Russians put the first living creature into space. The astonishing voyage of Laika proved a complicated, warm-blooded animal, man's best friend, could survive in space flight. The haste was so great to rush Laika into space to meet a propaganda-political deadline that the Korolev design team did not design a re-entry and recovery procedure for Laika. Soon however, the Korolev team figured out return procedures and hardware configurations and two dogs, "Belka" and "Strelka" were rocketed into space and returned. They even held a press conference. Could the dogs' masters be far behind?

Korolev family lore holds that manned flight, notably travel to the moon, obsessed "The Chief Designer" from an early age. As a toddler young Sergei gazed at the moon from his hometown in Ukraine and badgered his mother with question about "what was on the moon?" As a young father amidst the ruins of World War II (it claimed some 27 million Soviet lives; destroyed half the buildings in the European part of the country) his daughter recalls a 1946 conversation. She was reading Jules Verne's Voyage to the Moon, father saw the book, "He told me, You know, in about 30 years a human will be on the moon." Of course it turned out that thanks to the space race Korolev ignited, his rivals in America's Apollo program---by Neil Armstrong's July 1969 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'-- cut five years off his prediction. Vision, commitment, and ruthless determination pushed a young boy who helped out with hydroplanes as a teenager in Odessa, a port city on Black Sea. Korolev designed his first glider at 17 while a student at an Odessa Technical School. He became a pilot and moved to Moscow to take up a professional life as an aviation engineer. In 1929, infatuated by Tsiolkovsky's writings about space exploration, Sergei Pavlovich decided to devote himself to rocketry. He joined the Moscow branch of the "Group for Study of Cosmic Travel" (GIRD) and became the protégé of Fridrikh Arturovich Tsander (1887-1933), the man who developed the Soviet Union's first liquid-propelled rocket engine. It fell to his brilliant student Korolev, to launch communism's first successful liquid-fuel rocket, the "09" in 1933. When GIRD posted a notice of its success, it noted, "Now, Soviet rockets must conquer space!"

Korolev and his comrades made important progress towards breaking gravity's hold in the 1930's, including the flight of 'Model 212' which the 'Chief Designer' considered a miniature version of a future man carrier. But, Korolev's own high flying trajectory was cut short by a near-fatal trip to Stalin's frozen hell.

Like millions of other well-educated, well-placed innocent citizens Korolev fell victim to the collective insanity of the Stalinist great terror. The NKVD, the lethal KGB forerunner, swept Korolev into the whirlwind, into the GULAG system of forced labor prison-cum concentration and death camps. The Gulag's bureaucracy of terror dispatched him across Siberia in a sealed boxcar to Magadan, to work in the notorious Kolyma mines, where temperatures went down to -70° F and few survived. Backbreaking work damaged Korolev's heart. He lost his teeth, but another imprisoned aviation expert saved his life. The man, an airplane designer was ordered to staff a special prison, a sharashka, dedicated to designing warplanes. The military's needs put the 'chief designer' back to his life's work. He even finished the war in an officer's uniform, Korolev acted as one of specialist dispatched by Stalin to inspect and to carry off whatever remained of Nazi Germany's rocket program after the Americans had raided the facilities of Werner von Braun. Korolev even met with Stalin, after the war, as he carried out orders to reconstruct the Nazi von Braun's V-2 rocket, even though the "Chief Designer" argued his own Soviet designs were superior.

When Nikita Khrushchev consolidated power in the mid-50's Korolev found an enthusiastic supporter for some of his visionary work that had been cobbled together from those prison design labs into "Experimental Design Bureau n.1". The Chief Designer knew he had survived the GULAG due to iron will, implacable courage, connections, his own considerable management-organization skills, and a ready willingness to do the military's bidding. Korolev obtained commitments and funding to build the rocket that carried Sputnik beyond the heavens because he billed it as a 'nuclear equalizer'. The United States could drop atom bombs on its old ally turned cold-war enemy, the Soviet Union, from bomber bases in Europe, Turkey and Japan. Isolated geographically without forward bases, Korolev argued that only with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles could the Soviets strike the American heartland with the ultimate weapon, the H-bomb. 'The Chief Designer' lived for space exploration, manned space exploration. He used the military's needs for a nuclear delivery system to build the R-7, the booster rocket affectionately known as 'good ol' 7'. Korolev piggybacked his dreams onto the Kremlin's national security needs. Sputnik and Laika's great triumphs embolden him to begin secret training of men, cosmonauts, to ride another 'good ol' 7' into space. Secrecy was important, not only because the Cold War heightened ingrained Soviet paranoia, but also because his military wanted the next R7 dedicated to spying, not men flying. Korolev kept his eye on his life-long goal: putting a man on the moon.

When the military ordered the next R7 rocket be devoted to a spy in the sky satellite 'the Chief designer' went over their heads. He appealed directly to Khrushchev. As he basked in the propaganda glory Sputnik and Laika generated, Khrushchev decided Korolev no longer had to smuggle his plans for space exploration aboard military-priority rockets. Khrushchev approved a scheme to put the first man into earth orbit. Korolev selected Yuri Gagarin. In April 1961 to send a man into orbit aboard a new space capsule was a very risky venture. It took the iron will and implacable courage of Korolev, to try it.

Yuri Gagarin's voyage around earth caused an even greater reaction than Sputnik. He was hailed a hero. Khrushchev, the man who told the Capitalist west, "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." Now he bragged to Communist inner circles, "The future is ours, comrades!" The parade Khrushchev staged for the first man in space proclaimed the superiority of Soviet science and the socialist way of life. In terms of international prestige it probably marked the high water mark of Soviet history. Yet the Kremlin forbade the man who made it possible, Korolev, from sharing the glory. The chief designer did not stand atop the Lenin mausoleum where Gagarin and Khrushchev greeted adoring crowds. The all-powerful Communist party feared that American spies might assassinate their space age mastermind.

The Chief Designer rode the wave of momentum hard. He sent the first woman into space.

He organized the first 'space walk.' He got backing to design a lunar landing craft and a huge new rocket, the N-1 to hurl it towards the moon. But the military kept up a campaign to direct spending on rockets for its purposes, not space spectaculars.

And other design bureau competitors argued for their alternatives to the gigantic N-1, thirty engines, complicated launcher. Then there was the challenged posed by the United States. President Kennedy defined a space race his experts said America had a good chance to win: putting a man on the moon. The Apollo program claimed a $24 billion slice of the stronger US economic pie. The Russians knew that they could not match that commitment. The pressures on Korolev mounted. Failures in development of N-1 increased criticism from rivals. The chilling of the Cold War accelerated the militarization of the Soviet economy. The military demanded more resources in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. Moreover, the frustrations of the command socialist economy that could not compete, especially in the accomplishments of NASA in metallurgy, electronics, and computers, only tightened the vise squeezing 'the chief designer'. True, Korolev had staged a couple more spectacular feats, notably bringing earthlings the first photographs of the dark side of moon.

Again, Khrushchev gloried in rubbing the west's nose in a socialist 'first.' And when the 'chief designer' warned his great partner in world-beating propaganda that a race to the moon was a complicated endeavor, Khrushchev unleashed a competitor on him by ordering another design bureau to build a rival moon rocket. But in fall 1964 his more conservative comrades, led by Leonid Brezhnev, removed the colorful Kremlin chief. They denounced his bombast, braggadocio, and hair-brained scheming. The men of the Soviet military-industrial complex gained the upper hand. Korolev lost his top seated connection.

Still, the chief designer rushed ahead with plans to land a Soviet man on the moon. Problems continued with his N-1 rocket. And there were problems with his political life.

On his 59^th birthday Korolev entered an elite Kremlin hospital for what was supposed to be a routine operation. A politically reliable, politically prestigious doctor, the Minister of Health took charge. What exactly happened to the mystery man of the Soviet moon mission is still a secret. Whether the cancerous tumor discovered in his bowels was too large, whether the surgeon botched the operation, whether a heart weakened in the Gulag or other injuries complicated his case remains unclear. One fact is known, the chief designer died on the operating table. The next day the Kremlin made his name public for the first time. In death Sergei Pavlovich Korolev enjoyed his only moment in his country's limelight. He had a Soviet hero's funeral.

The men who kept his identity a state secret so long put his remains in the most hallowed of public places in the wall of heroes by Red Square in the Kremlin wall.

The Soviet space program went on, but without Korolev's drive, determination, connections and management skills the setback mounted into insurmountable problems.

When N-1 rockets went up in fireballs, instead of into the cosmos, 'the chief designers' dream of putting the first human being on the moon was effectively shelved. A month after the last N-1 disaster on July 20, Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility. Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the moon. The Soviets soon mothballed Korolev's lunar lander. They hid it away as they promoted a 'big lie' that they never had been racing the Americans to put a man on the mood. The secret artifact of the 'mystery man's' life-long dream of lunar exploration remained hidden until the Cold War ended.