I caught a documentary the other day on the Russian space program, and an important part of it was a description of the driving force behind the USSR's space program-- the man in charge, Sergei Korolev.   His is a story that only the USSR could produce.  Korolev went from obscurity, to leading a research bureau in his youth, to being purged and thrown into the gulag, then rehabilitated enough to get commissioned as a colonel in the Red Army in order to go to Germany to get rocket parts and information.  After that, laboring on ICBM and space launch rocketry in total secrecy until his untimely death, rumored to be from medical malpractice, but possibly only from overstress on a gulag-weakened body.  After his death, glowing enshrinement in the pantheon of Red heroes.

Korolev right before his death:




"Sergei Korolev was born on December 30, 1906 (January 12, 1907, in the Gregorian calendar, currently in use in Russia) in the city of Zhitomir in present day Ukraine, in the family of a Russian language teacher. A year later, family moved to Kiev, Ukraine. In 1910, Sergei's parents separated and he moved with his mother to her parents home in the town of Nezhin. Korolev's parents officially divorced in October 1916 and soon Sergei's mother remarried. In 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the family moved to Odessa, a major port city in Ukraine...

In 1924, Korolev transfered to the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, where he joined a group of glider enthusiasts. Two years later Korolev transferred to Moscow's Bauman High Technical School, MVTU, the best engineering college in Russia, often compared these days to MIT in the United States.

Korolev graduated from MVTU in 1929 and in 1931 he joined the Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute, TsAGI. In July 1932, Korolev was appointed chief of Jet Propulsion Research Group, GIRD, one of the earliest state-sponsored centers for rocket development in the USSR. In 1933, the group was reorganized into the Jet Propulsion Research Institute, RNII, where Korolev worked as Deputy Chief of the institute. At RNII, Korolev led the development of cruise missiles and of a manned rocket-powered glider.

On June 27, 1938, at the height of Stalin's purges, Korolev was arrested and sent to concentration camps in Siberia, in the region of the Kolyma River. Korolev fateful roller coaster continued in March 1940, when he was suddenly returned to Moscow and imprisoned in the infamous Butyrskaya prison. On July 10 of the same year, a special commission chaired by Lavrenti Beria, chief of Stalin's secret police, sentenced Korolev to eight years in labor camps on phony allegations of sabotage. "Fortunately" for Korolev, in September 1940, he was transferred to "sharashka" -- one of numerous design bureaus in prison. The sharashka network was organized in 1939, to exploit huge population of the Soviet GULAG. Officially called TsKB-29, Korolev's sharashka was led by Andrei Tupolev, also a GULAG prisoner and located in the city of Omsk. There, Korolev participated in the development of the Tu-2 bomber, a major aircraft of the Soviet Air Force during World War II. Korolev was then transferred to another sharashka in the city of Kazan, where he became a deputy to Valentin Glushko, his former colleague from NII-3 and future partner and competitor at the dawn of space age."

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/korolev.html


Korolev's arrest photo:




"Following the war, Korolev was released from prison and appointed Chief Constructor for development of a long-range ballistic missile. By 1 April 1953, as Korolev was preparing for the first launch of the R-11 rocket, he received approval from the Council of Ministers for development of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the R-7. To concentrate on development of the R-7, Korolev¹s other projects were spun off to a new design bureau in Dnepropetrovsk headed by Korolev's assistant, Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel. This was the first of several design bureaus, some later competing with Korolev¹s, that would spinoff once Korolev had perfected a new technology. It was Korolev¹s R-7 ICBM that launched Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957."

http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/korolev.html


R-7 Rocket series:




Further reading on the R-7 rocket

Further reading on Sputnik

Korolev followed on the international success of Sputnik with further launches, all with political goals to achieve "firsts" in the space race.  The first living being in space, a dog (who incidentally did not survive the trip); the first man in space; the first woman in space; the first spacewalk; the first multi-man mission. All of this was done by him anonymously; he was only known as "The Chief Designer".


"On 3 December 1960, Korolev suffered his first heart attack. During his convalescence, it was also discovered that he was suffering from a kidney disorder, a condition brought on by his detention in the Soviet prison camps. He was warned by the doctors that if he continued to work as intensely as he had, he would not live long. Korolev became convinced that Khrushchev was only interested in the space program for its propaganda value and feared that he would cancel it entirely if the Soviets started losing their leadership to the United States, so he continued to push himself even harder.

By 1962 Sergei Korolev's health problems were beginning to accumulate and he was suffering from numerous ailments. He had a bout of intestinal bleeding that led to him being taken to the hospital in an ambulance. In 1964 doctors diagnosed him with cardiac arrhythmia. In February he spent ten days in the hospital after a heart problem. Shortly after he was suffering from inflammation of his gallbladder. The mounting pressure of his workload was also taking a heavy toll, and he was suffering from a lot of fatigue. Korolev was also experiencing hearing loss, possibly from repeated exposure to loud rocket engine tests.

The actual circumstances of Korolev's death remain somewhat uncertain. In December 1965, he was supposedly diagnosed with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine. He entered the hospital on 5 January 1966 for somewhat routine surgery. He died nine days later. It was stated by the government that he had what turned out to be a large, cancerous tumor in his abdomen. But Glushko later reported that he actually died due to a poorly performed operation for hemorrhoids. Another version states that the operation was going well and no one was predicting any complications. Suddenly during the operation, Korolev started to bleed. Doctors tried to provide intubation for him to allow him to breathe freely, but his jaws, injured during his time in a gulag, had not healed properly and impeded the installation of the breathing tube. Korolev died without regaining consciousness. According to Harford, Korolev's family confirmed the cancer story. His weak heart contributed to his death during surgery.

Under a policy initiated by Stalin and continued by his successors, the identity of Korolev was not revealed until after his death. The purported reason was to protect him from foreign agents from the United States. As a result, the Soviet people didn't become aware of his accomplishments until after his death. His obituary was published in the Pravda newspaper on 16 January 1966, showing a photograph of Korolev with all his medals. Korolev's ashes were interred with state honors in the Kremlin Wall."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Korolyov

Korolev's burial urn in the Kremlin Wall:

Good read OP

http://www.negrospaceprogram.com

While I suppose a bit of slightly-related humor may be in order to counteract the negativity of reading about Soviet death camps and the like, I do believe that the creator of that piece was making reference to the segregated baseball leagues.

Anyway, a video to get back on track.  

https://youtu.be/YQfy5u3yOZQ