![]() The propaganda value alone of his work was enough to guarantee the Soviet Union’s superpower status. Korolev spent several months in a gulag in Siberia and spent years working on projects imprisoned in a special jail for intellectuals. ![]() His achievements, however, came after years of imprisonment during Stalin's purges of the 1930s. He developed the capsules, control systems and rigorous checks that ensured that every person he sent into space during his lifetime came back alive. This genius at the heart of the Russian space programme was one of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded secrets.īorn in Ukraine, Korolev oversaw the design of the vast R7 rocket that launched the first satellite, first dog, first man, first woman and first spacewalker into orbit. Only when he died in 1966 was the name of the Chief Designer, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, revealed to the world. ![]() It was an overwhelming, and largely spontaneous, celebration of Soviet achievement.īut the engineer who made the first human spaceflight possible was nowhere to be seen. Within a few days of returning to Earth, Yuri Gagarin stood alongside Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow’s Red Square to be welcomed by tens of thousands of people cheering his success. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |