Arrest and imprisonment

S.P. Korolyov was arrested on June 27, 1938, in the height of Stalin's purges. He was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and his property was confiscated. He was sent to Kolyma, Siberia where he worked in a gold mine. Other members of the RNII were also arrested. The program was set back for years and fell behind the rapid progress taking place in Germany. S.P. Korolyov was abruptly relieved from Kolyma in 1940 (possibly due to the inter­ference of his former teacher Andrey Tupolev, a famous aircraft designer). His prison sentence was reviewed and reduced to eight years in labor camps. He was moved to Tupolev's prison design bureau (such bureaus were called " sharashkas"), where he worked on the devolopment of bomber air crafts. During World War II, this prison design bureau designed both the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber and the Ilyushin 11-2 ground attack aircraft.

In 1942 S.P. Korolyov was moved to the prison design bureau led by the rocket engine designer Glushko, the bureau where rocket plane boosters were designed.

Korolyov (along with Tupolev and oth­ers) was finally discharged by special go­vernment decree on June 27, 1944, and his prior convictions were dismissed.

Ballistic missiles

In 1945 Korolyov was awarded the Badge of Honor, his first decoration, for his work on the development of rocket motors for military aircraft.

On Sept. 8, 1945, Korolyov was sent to Germany. While still in Germany, S.P. Korolyov was appointed Chief Design­er of the long range ballistic missile program and by 1950, he had the additional respon­sibility of heading a special design bureau. This bureau later became famous as ОКБ-1 (Opytnoye Konstruktorskiye Bureau). Korolyov's team began its work by pro­ducing a working replica of FAU-2 missile, which the Nazis had used against the British during the later years of the war. The new mossile was designated the R-l and was first tested in October 1947. In its outward appearance, the R-l was similar to its German original but surpassed it con­siderably in many parameters.

In 1947 Korolyov's team began working on more advanced designs, with improve­ments to the range and throw weight. The R-2 missile doubled the range of the FAU-2 and was the first design to utilize a separate warhead. This was followed by R-3 missile, which had a range of 3, 000 kilometers.

In the early fifties S.P. Korolyov and his team started sending animals into the upper atmosphere and they collected valuable bio­logical data.

In 1953, Korolyov was elected a corre­sponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and in 1956 was awarded the country's highest honours - the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of Socialist Labour. By this time, serious work was being done on the intercontinental ballistic missile, R-7, called " semyorka". In 1957, it became the world's first ICBM, when it successfully covered a distance of about 6400 km, from Baikonur to Kamchatka peninsula, carrying a dummy warhead.

Space program

S.P. Korolyov wanted to be the first to make a missile that could sever the ties of Earth gravity. In spite of the progress on ICBM technology, Korolyov was preoccu­pied with the use of rockets for space travel. In 1953, he first proposed the use of the R-7 design for launching a satellite into orbit.

The period between 1954 and 1957 was the heyday of his creative activity. In those years, he succeeded in everything he under­took. A new space era in the history of mankind began on October 4, 1957, when the first Soviet sputnik was launched into space.

Less than a month later, on November 3, Sputnik 2 was launched. This new space­craft weighed six times more than the Sputnik 1 and included the dog Laika as a payload.

Moon

Korolyov then turned his attention to reaching the Moon. A modified version of the R-7 launch vehicle with a new upper stage was to be used. The engine for this final stage was the first designed to be fired in outer space. The first three probes sent to the Moon in 1958 failed and only Luna 2 successfully impacted the surface. Luna 3 was launched only two years after Sputnik 1, and was the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the Moon.

Manned flights

Korolyov's planning for the manned mission had begun back in 1958, when design studies were done on the future Vostok spacecraft. It was to hold a single passenger in a space suit, and be fully auto­mated. The capsule had an escape mechanism for problems prior to launch, and a soft-landing and ejection system during the recovery.

On May 15, 1960 an unmanned proto­type completed 64 orbits of the Earth, but failed to return. Four test vehicles were then sent into orbit carrying dogs, of which the last two were completely successful. After gaining approval from the govern­ment, a modified version of the R-7 was used to launch the first man in space, Yuri Alexeevich Gagarin, into orbit on April 12,

1961. He returned to Earth via parachute after ejecting at an altitude of 7 km.

This was followed up by additional Vostok flights, culminating with the 81 orbits completed with Vostok 5 and the launch of the first woman cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6.

Following Vostok, Korolyov decided to build a spacecraft capable to lift a three crew members capsule into space.