New Article: The Genius Who Launched the First Space Program
Sergei Korolev was the secret architect of the Soviet space program. His career demonstrates the triumph of vision and institutional innovation over conventionality and bureaucracy.
This article by Sven Etienne Peterson was published on Palladium Magazine on October 25, 2024.
Venus is a Russian planet. This is the position of Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency from 2018 to 2022, and well known for his many provocative statements. However, despite a 2013 reorganization of the Russian space industry instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the country’s space program has continued to face difficulties in the past decade. This was perhaps best reflected in Russia’s Luna-25 lander smashing against the surface of the Moon on August 19, 2023, effectively losing in a race to the lunar south pole against India, which successfully landed its Chandrayaan-3 just four days later. The days of the “Space Race” between only Moscow and Washington are long over.
But the reality is that the conquest of space has always been a more complicated story than that of competition between two monolithic states. Some contemporary organizations, especially Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are often used to convey a sense of increased prominence of the private sector in the space industry. However, Elon Musk might better be understood as following a longer trend of visionary individuals rising to make their mark on the space industry. Former Russian space agency head Rogozin’s position toward Venus, in particular, is based on the achievements of a Soviet design bureau named OKB-302, which designed and operated the first probes in human history to reach another planet. Part of a larger network of competing semi-autonomous design bureaus, OKB-302 was not the most successful of its kind. That is a title that can only reasonably be reserved for OKB-1 and its chief designer: Sergei Korolev.
In his home country, Korolev is still revered as a hero to this day. He was responsible for the establishment and operation of the world’s first true space program, which, in his time, would also be the world’s best. As we look towards the future of space exploration, emerging players from SpaceX to China would do well to learn from this example, which shows that greatness demands the continuous attention of visionary leaders, lest success falter under the weight of procedure. After all, spaceflight is not just a technological challenge but also an organizational one, and its future will be defined by those institutions that can materialize bold visions and maintain high standards of excellence. Entrenched bureaucracy and the frontier will forever be at odds, and space—despite the vast scale of the undertaking—is no exception.
From Gulag to Orbit
While implementing policies aimed at industrial expansion, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin suffered from periods of mass starvation, and the most productive agricultural workers had their properties seized and were often sent to forced labor camps. The most promising intellectuals, scientists, and aspiring elites were viciously persecuted by their government and betrayed by those around them. Despite the promise of revolutionary change and innovation following a socialist revolution, the reality that Soviet citizens found themselves in by the 1930s was not an environment conducive to engaging in new ideas or radical propositions, let alone exploring the cosmos.
Sergei Korolev, then a young aircraft engineer and space travel enthusiast, was one such victim during this period of political persecution and overly narrow ideological orthodoxy. Having completed studies in aviation in Soviet Ukraine, Korolev showed great promise as an engineer. He quickly rose through the ranks of the early Soviet Union’s research institutions focused on missile propulsion—something understood to be of interest to national security—and came into personal contact with other spaceflight pioneers like Friedrich Tsander and Valentin Glushko. In 1938, he suddenly discovered he had been denounced to the Soviet secret police, and was promptly sent to a prison camp in far eastern Siberia for the next several years, ignorant of his accuser’s identity.
The active persecution of its most gifted individuals ultimately proved detrimental to the war readiness of the Soviet Union, something recognized in the aftermath of the German invasion of the country. Despite suffering a heart attack, scurvy, and losing most of his teeth during his harsh imprisonment, Korolev was eventually transferred by Soviet authorities to a military aircraft engineering facility in 1940 to serve as an imprisoned researcher instead of a hard laborer. He was again reassigned in 1942, this time to a rocketry design bureau led by Glushko who, while also imprisoned, had mysteriously managed to avoid the worst of the Gulag system. Korolev and Glushko would eventually be discharged from their imprisonment in 1944, only for Korolev to be commissioned as a Colonel of the Red Army the following year.
On September 8th, 1945, Colonel Korolev was brought to Berlin with an assortment of other Soviet experts to reverse-engineer the technologically sophisticated German V-2 rocket that had long terrorized the Allied powers. Designed by Wernher von Braun, the V-2 was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile, and its design would be vital to the further development of both nuclear weapons systems and spaceflight technology. The satirical quip, “we aim at the stars, but sometimes we hit London,” would become infamous after the war.
Von Braun’s research and development of missile propulsion was motivated by a personal interest in space exploration, and he would become the chief architect of the U.S. space program after surrendering to U.S. forces at the end of the Second World War. While the Soviet Union initiated its own program to recuperate German scientists into its research ecosystem, called Operation Osoaviakhim, it was far less successful than the U.S.’s Operation Paperclip. Most leading German scientists preferred to surrender to the Americans and made extensive efforts to be captured by them rather than the Soviets in the final weeks of the war.
Despite the horrific persecution Korolev had faced at the hands of his own government, he worked tirelessly to decipher German technology. Fellow Soviet engineer Vasily Mishin remarked upon meeting Korolev in Berlin that he “was the first person [he] had met who actually understood all the intricate details of rocket design.” Something that eventually became apparent to the Soviet authorities. After Stalin made rocket and missile development a national priority, Korolev was appointed chief designer of long-range missiles at a new institute called the Scientific Research Institute No. 88.
Although at a disadvantage compared to the U.S., which had secured the best of Germany’s wartime scientific minds and complete assemblages of V-2 rockets, Korolev was convinced that the USSR should immediately begin work on constructing a new rocket even more advanced than the V-2. The Soviet government instead ordered him to simply design a copy of the original V-2 using Soviet infrastructure and materials, dubbed the R-1. After quickly succeeding in this project, Korolev’s more sophisticated R-2 design was finally given the green light in 1948 and was followed by a series of cutting-edge developments, including the R-7 Semyorka—the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile.
Korolev’s work on ICBMs had a striking parallel to Von Braun’s military work on the V-2 and later U.S. systems. Both engineers found patronage in national security but were keenly aware and enthusiastic about the technology’s potential for space travel, with Korolev’s wife revealing that during this period, he “thought about space all the time, it was his life. He wanted to do non-military research, he wanted to explore space, and to travel to the closest planets.”
Korolev was first officially given the go-ahead to use the R-7 rocket to launch satellites into space in 1956, but only after a concerted and sustained lobbying campaign by himself and other like-minded Soviet engineers. This included writing articles on spaceflight for Soviet newspapers, which were ultimately picked up on by the CIA and influenced the U.S. to begin its own satellite programs—American articles that Korolev obtained and used to scare his own political leaders back home. Despite continuous skepticism toward Korolev’s project, and a lack of appreciation for the psychological impact that the launch of the first artificial satellite might have across the world, Soviet officials agreed to support the project out of fear of being outdone by the United States. In a way, Korolev engineered the Space Race himself by putting the idea of it out there and letting geopolitical rivalry do the rest.
In October 1957, Korolev launched Sputnik 1 on an R-7 rocket, marking humanity’s first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The event enthused the people of the world and panicked officials in the capitals of the Soviet Union’s rivals. Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who had expressed boredom at the concept of Sputnik, was now demanding Korolev launch another satellite the next month, in time for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution. Six times the mass of Sputnik 1, its successor was designed from scratch with no time for testing or quality checks. With a live dog, Laika, onboard, the mission proved to be another astounding success for Korolev and the Soviet Union as a whole. The United States would only launch its first successful satellite with the help of Wernher von Braun in 1958, trailing well behind the capabilities demonstrated by its Cold War rival.
Von Braun long wished to meet the head of the Soviet space program, but this was made impossible by the Soviet Union’s extreme secrecy over Korolev’s identity. Known only as the Glavniy Konstruktor, or Chief Designer of Soviet Rocket-Space Systems, throughout his entire life, Korolev was protected from possible assassination attempts and bolstered the ideological mythos surrounding Soviet success. The Nobel Prize committee, with the intention of awarding individuals in 1958, asked Khruschev the identity of the man responsible for Sputnik 1. Khruschev would effectively strip Korolev of his due glory in order to retain the Chief Designer’s identity a mystery, responding publicly that “all of the Soviet people had distinguished themselves in the work on Sputnik.”
Despite this lack of public recognition, Korolev was ultimately responsible for a staggering number of firsts in humanity’s initial steps into the cosmos, amassing significant owned power. He was at the head of Yuri Gagarin’s training to be the first man in space, sending the first woman into space, overseeing the first spacewalk and first object to land on the Moon, producing the first photos of the dark side of the Moon, and putting the first artificial satellite of the Moon into orbit. Commanding a deep understanding of the material and physical principles of rocket and spaceflight mechanics allowed Korolev to implement an efficient first-principles approach to developing new hardware on a budget much lower than his American rivals. Some rocket engines, like the NK-33, were able to achieve levels of power and efficiency that Western engineering would not consider physically possible until sold to the American private sector after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By the mid-1960s, Korolev was in charge of rocket designs, planetary spacecraft, and manned spaceflight, as well as explicit military equipment like communications and spy satellites. During this period, few individuals held as much authority in a civilian capacity as Korolev.. Long past his days in forced labor camps, a commitment to excellence and passion for the cosmos had transformed Korolev into one of the most powerful men in the world.
The Rise and Fall of a Personal Space Empire
It was no coincidence that power over the early Soviet space program was concentrated in a singular individual, an outcome not dissimilar to Wernher von Braun at NASA at the time, or even Elon Musk, decades later, at SpaceX. The exploration of space was a radical idea that had never been seriously organized before and required significant bureaucratic innovation. The burden of proof that reaching space was even physically possible rested on those working in research and development. While much of the USSR offered few opportunities for independent organization, the country’s research and development institutions served as the ideal vehicles to build a new kind of organization capable of space exploration. Moreover, they were able to stave off direct control by Soviet politicians for decades and allowed individuals to rise in prestige through excellence.
The basic institutional unit of Soviet research and development consisted of design bureaus, often referred to by their Russian acronym OKB. Design bureaus were frequently attached to larger research organizations dedicated to specific engineering needs, such as Korolev’s design bureau, OKB-1, which researched rocketry while attached to Scientific Research Institute-88. After lobbying Nikita Khruschev, the Council of Ministers designated OKB-1 as an independent organization in 1956, significantly bolstering the prestige and independence of Korolev. Such a development was arguably one of the closest equivalents to starting one’s own company in the USSR, and it allowed Korolev the freedom to begin building a larger network of industrial plants and smaller bureaus to complete projects agreed upon with the Soviet government. OKBs formed an important part of the byzantine and rivalrous landscape of powerful institutions within the nominally centrally-planned Soviet system but often enjoyed a greater level of institutional autonomy and less oversight than the average Western government agency.
Fellow engineer and cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov would describe OKB-1’s sphere of influence as an “empire,” and stated that, as he knew him, Korolev “was very ambitious, but not to move up the ladder or win medals … the most important thing for him was to do something truly big with his life.” The structure of Korolev’s empire was loose, largely informal, and revolved around him personally. Based out of the remote Baikonur Cosmodrome, a secret facility hidden deep within Central Asia, Korolev was able to operate this unique undertaking largely as a self-contained operation. Korolev’s thrift and charisma were perhaps the most important character traits that allowed him to achieve this. The former reduced the expenses and, consequently, the lobbying necessary for these projects; the latter fostered loyalty among his team.
Authority over early space exploration was only vaguely defined at first. OKB-1 indisputably dominated the field, but it was not the only bureau. Rather, Korolev constantly battled to maintain political favor and dominance over rivals and bureaus pursuing their ambitions in this new frontier. Rival institutions were led by Korolev’s old colleague Glushko, as well as the military-backed Vladimir Chelomey. The most significant disruption came in the refusal of Korolev and Glushko to work together on the N1 super heavy-lift rocket—which had the potential to send a Soviet man to the Moon before the United States—after Korolev learned that it was none other than Glushko who had denounced him to the secret police during Stalin’s Great Purge and condemned him to years of suffering and torture.
Alliances with members of the Communist Party were a vital tool to secure OKB-1’s dominance over the rival fiefdoms of the emerging space program. Korolev’s position was only fully entrenched after his friendship with a man named Leonid Brezhnev in the early 1960s matured into a personal contact with the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1964—upon Brezhnev’s ascendance to that position. We can only speculate on what the master designer would have done next. Korolev died soon after, following a routine surgery in 1966, and left the space program, built on personal connections and authority, facing a crisis of coordination and vision.
Initially, succession seemed feasible, with control over OKB-1 passing to Vasily Mishin, who had long served as Korolev’s chief deputy. Mishin attempted to complete many of the projects initiated by Korolev, but the most important would be perfecting the N1 heavy rocket that Korolev had designed but did not live to see materialized. Unfortunately, the N1 exploded on all four of its launches, destroying part of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and shattering every window within a six-kilometer radius on its second attempt. An engineer more than a socialite, Mishin was also unable to maneuver the Soviet Communist Party landscape quite as effectively as his predecessor and began to fall increasingly into the inefficient but formalized hierarchies presented by the Soviet bureaucracy.
In his own memoirs, Mishin describes how the slow integration of OKB-1 into the Soviet system tore apart “the planning, financing, supply, and scientific and technical management” of what used to be a reliable and efficient semi-autonomous empire. Without a leader capable of defending against the environment of incompetence surrounding it, the management was now “practically carried out by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (in particular, Minister of Defense Dmitri Ustinov).”
Mishin’s inability to maintain the independence of the system that preceded him also allowed old rivals to take advantage of the opening. This was demonstrated most seriously by Vladimir Chelomey, who had been competing with Korolev on a Soviet mission to the Moon using an independent rocket system designed by Glushko after the latter's dispute with Korolev over the N1. Traditionally concerned with the development of cruise missiles, Chelomey’s OKB-52 enjoyed significant support from and familiarity with top officials in the Soviet military, and it gradually came into a position capable of rivaling the competencies of OKB-1 after consuming a number of smaller space-related design bureaus over time.
With Mishin particularly inept at navigating the landscape of the Soviet elite, Chelomey gained the support of Defense Minister Ustinov in usurping OKB-1’s role in the development of humanity’s first orbital space stations as part of the secretive Almaz program. Other responsibilities that Korolev oversaw would be distributed to smaller design bureaus as well, including management of the USSR’s Lunar and Venus exploration programs. As a result, most of the Soviet Union’s still formidable accomplishments in space during the early 1970s would come from very different institutions than the decade prior.
The death of Korolev ended Soviet dreams of landing men on the Moon, as Mishin proved incapable of holding his predecessor’s empire together. Despite this outcome, it can be argued this competitive system served the Soviet Union quite well as a whole. The replacement of a failing institution by a rival proved a viable way to maintain a lead over the United States in many key areas for the next few decades, such as the development of space stations and the exploration of Venus. Another independent institution, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, led the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission between the USSR and theU.S. in 1975, a significant milestone that marked detente between the Cold War powers and a symbolic close to the space race following NASA’s Moon landings. The dysfunction of Mishin eventually caught the attention of the Soviet government after the employees of OKB-1 signed a letter demanding his removal, which Brezhnev did in 1974.
Following Mishin, the remnants of Sergei Korolev’s empire fell under the command of his old nemesis, Valentin Glushko. Glushko’s ascension to power also came on the back of the Soviet state’s centralization of OKB-1 into a larger organization known as NPO Energia, returning the bureau to a dominant position within the Soviet space industry. A fairly competent manager, Glushko led the development of several important projects in this capacity, including the construction of the Mir space station and the Buran program. The latter of these involved the construction of the Soviet Union’s first space shuttle and the design of a new heavy launch vehicle replacing Korolev’s N1 concept once and for all.
The American Private Space Company As Design Bureau
Despite the Soviet Union keeping up with Western advances in space technology, funding for space gradually dried up by the late 1980s. Catastrophe befell the space industry upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. With Glushko dying just two years before, a lack of leadership only amplified the chaos and disorder of this time. During this disarray, the new President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, created the Russian Space Agency in 1992. This represented a significant shift in the chain of command for the Russian space sector, making it more similar to NASA. No longer would a multi-centered landscape of various design bureaus and personal empires compete for competence and authority.
The issues faced by the Russian space program were grounded in a national economic collapse and a lack of security, necessity and economic incentives for developing new technology. Russia’s space agency proved incapable of addressing serious issues ranging from a massive decline in the quality of industrial processes required for spacecraft and rockets to innumerable corruption scandals surrounding the institution’s leadership and the costs of spaceport maintenance. This period of the space program’s deep integration into Russia’s dysfunctional political and industrial landscape proved to be its least accomplished.
Part of the reason for the consolidation of the space program’s structure under a federal agency was due to the lasting humiliation that the American Apollo missions had imposed on Russia and the perception that American success was due to a better division of labor and mission-oriented approach. In some ways, this was true. There were few rivalries within the U.S. space program on the scale of the Soviet design bureaus to impede progress toward objectives administered by political authorities. However, those most passionate about space exploration are not always the most enthusiastic about following mission plans and outlines directed by the state.
Wernher von Braun resigned from NASA in 1972 after finding he was unable to secure political and financial support for the colonization of the Moon and a manned mission to Mars. While Soviet design bureaus were reliant on state funding, they still allowed innovative and passionate leaders to pursue their projects with greater flexibility than would be expected in a government agency.
Admiration of NASA following the Moon landings, however, tended to obfuscate that agency’s own problems with bureaucracy. Although backed by the wealthiest government in the world, the U.S. space agency completed its last manned lunar expedition in 1972 and deorbited the space station Skylab in 1979. It has accomplished few new major successes over the past fifty years, having been increasingly relegated to probing neighboring celestial bodies and servicing manned orbits around the Earth. The Space Shuttle program ran from 1981 to 2011, serving little functional purpose for the advancement of human presence in space while accruing around $200 billion in total costs. The U.S. government’s eye for cheaper launch costs gradually resulted in the loss of its capability to fly to the International Space Station (ISS), completed in 2011, with its own rockets or rocket engines until SpaceX recovered the ability to do so in 2020. For those nine years, the U.S. relied—of all countries—on Russia and its rockets.
Eventually, a U.S. equivalent to autonomous design bureaus under the personal command of visionary individuals did emerge: private space companies. The high entry costs, technical challenges, and heavy regulation of the space industry had long sealed the sector off from extensive private entrepreneurship. Commercial ventures were attempted and occasionally achieved a measure of success, but it was Elon Musk who demonstrated with SpaceX that such organizations could be viable in the U.S. system and make notable advances such as reusable rockets. Other companies, such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, are also competing. This development has significantly reduced the costs of space travel, ironically undoing the early 2000s Russian lead on low-cost satellite launches.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have won contracts to develop critical technologies for future American missions to the Moon. The current state of the industry in the U.S. echoes the landscape of competing design bureaus that existed in the Soviet space program during Korolev’s day. It isn’t a coincidence that many of the players share personal similarities with him as well.
Elon Musk, in particular, demonstrates an exceptional understanding of rocket engineering and a skill for getting things done efficiently. Musk even wrote in 2019 that “a biography on Korolev has center place in my study” and went so far as to give Korolev’s descendants a free tour of the SpaceX factory in 2021. Korolev’s grandson, Andrey Korolev, remarked that “Elon Musk is more or less a kind of reincarnation of Sergei Korolev,” as the two “clearly shared a common ideal of space exploration, not just in terms of curiosity but in terms of human destiny.” Some commentators have even pointed out parallels between SpaceX’s Starship design and Korolev’s N1.
The prospects for space in Sergei Korelev’s motherland are more mixed. Russia now has a market economy and extremely wealthy individuals, many of whom are interested in space, yet it hasn’t yet witnessed the development of any large private space companies. State-affiliated programs did successfully attempt commercialization and even competed internationally before the rise of SpaceX. After a series of rocket launch failures from 2011 to 2013, the dysfunction was addressed by Vladimir Putin’s administration, resulting in the promotion of Dmitry Rogozin, then Deputy Prime Minister, to announce that "extremely harsh measures" would be taken "and spell the end of the [Russian] space industry as we know it.” What followed was a full-scale reorganization of the Russian Space Agency into a state corporation called Roscosmos in 2016.
The new Roscosmos now reports directly to the Russian President and serves as a contracting authority for programs to be implemented by the industry. Moreover, Roscosmos now owns a majority stake in almost all companies that make up the Russian space industry, effectively establishing a monopoly. Naturally, it was Rogozin himself who eventually took the leading position atop Roscosmos, securing something akin to his own personal fiefdom.
Rogozin announced timelines for the construction of a permanently manned lunar base to be operated with China, the development of an independent new space station, as well as the launch of Russia's first mission to Venus since the Soviet era. Much of this is due to rising geopolitical tensions on Earth and Rogozin’s own nationalist convictions. Rogozin’s plans for renewed exploration of Venus, for example, seemingly don’t shy away from hints at a Russian interplanetary empire. This is a bold vision in itself, but one spurred by a different motivation than that of Musk or Korolev.
Rogozin’s direction was cut short due to his replacement by former Deputy Minister of Defense Yury Borisov in July 2022, who has increased focus on anti-satellite capabilities. However, Russia is unlikely to reach the success of the Soviet period until its space program is led by a live player. It is unclear if Russia will rediscover the conditions necessary to produce another starry-eyed empire such as Korolev’s, but others are already well on their way.
The American and Chinese space sectors both show immense potential. Now that commercial viability has been demonstrated, both also attract political backing and a new generation of idealistic talent ideologically committed to space travel. Whichever Earthly power will one day claim Venus and other worlds will, before outcompeting geopolitical rivals, have to beat back the hydra of creeping, perspectiveless bureaucracy, and will have to become a polity willing to bet on the vision of exceptional individuals.
Sven Etienne Peterson is a freelance writer and researcher. You can follow him at @Sven_Etienne.