Sergei Korolov was the 'Chief Designer' who was responsible for the development of the early Soviet space programme. He was born on December 30, 1906, at Zhitomir in the Ukraine. In his teens he built gliders, but by the early 1930s had switched his attention to rocketry. He became a founder member of a rocket society called GIRD. The society fired the first Soviet liquid-propellant rocket in 1933. During World War 2 Korolev was involved with the development of engines for the rocket-assisted take-off of aircraft. After the war he headed a team that test-fired and developed V-2s acquired from the Germans at Kapastin Yar, near Volgograd. From this work came the first successful ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile), the SS-6 or Sapwood. Its first flight took place in August 1957. On October 4 a modified Sapwood left the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia and placed the world's first artificial satellite into orbit, Sputnik 1. Korolev pressed on with his plans to put Man into space, which would fulfil the dreams of his late friend and mentor Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He set in motion the Vostok programme, which resulted in Yuri Gagarin pioneering manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961, and the follow-up Voshkod and Soyuz programmes. Soviet cosmonauts still use Soyuz spacecraft today as ferries to the Mir space station, a tangible memorial to the great 'Chief Designer'. Plagued with ill-health in his later life, Korolev died on January 14, 1966, and his ashes were placed in the Kremlin wall.
