Early career

S.P. KOROLYOV

Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov was the founder and guiding genius of the USSR spaceflight program. His name comes up first when we speak about the space era. He deserves the most credits for turning rocket weapons into an instrument of space exploration and making the Soviet Union the world's first space-faring nation. It was under his guidance that the first three Soviet artificial satellites were made, the back side of the Moon was photographed for the first time, the first landing on the Moon was accomplished, and research on Venus and Mars with the help of automatic devices started. Korolyov paved the way into space for the first Russian cosmonauts.

Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov was born on January 12, 1907 in Zhytomyr, a small provincial center in central Ukraine. Sergey's parents divorced when he was three years old and Sergey grew up in Nezhin under the care of his grandparents. Since the age of ten he was fostered by his stepfather, who was an engineer and mechanic, and proved to be a good influ­ence on the child. His stepfather moved the family to Odessa in 1917, after getting a job with the regional railway.

Education

In 1924 Sergey Korolyov finished Odessa Special Building School (Stroy-profshkola №1), where he received voca­tional training in carpentry. In the same year, he was admitted to the Kiev Poly-technical Institute, where he joined a group of glider enthusiasts, and designed his first glider.

In July 1926, S.P. Korolyov transferred to Moscow N.E. Bauman Higher Technical School (MVTU), the best engineering col­lege in Russia. In addition to his studies, S.P. Korolyov had more opportunities to fly gliders and powered aircraft, and he reveled in the experience. He studied at the Bauman Higher Technical School from 1926 to 1930 where he earned his degree in aeronautical engineering.

Early career

Sergey Korolyov was strongly influ­enced by the writings of Konstantine Tsiolkovsky and he started dreaming about space flight. In the 1930s, he became one of the first directors of the newly established scientific rocket technology research and production organisation.

It was during 1930 that S.P. Korolyov became interested in the possibilities of liq­uid rocket engines. As his interest was pri­marily in aircraft, he saw the potential for use of these engines to propel airplanes. In 1931, together with a space travel enthusi­ast Friedrich Tsander, he participated in the creation of the Jet Propulsion Research Group (GIRD), one of the earliest state-sponsored centers for rocket development in the USSR. In May 1932, S.P. Korolyov was appointed chief of the group. During the following years, the GIRD group devel­oped three different propulsion systems, each more successful than the last. The group accomplished their first launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in 1933. It was called GIRD-X and it flew to a height of 263m.

In 1933, the government decided to merge the GIRD organization with the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) in Lenin­grad. The merger created the Jet Propul­sion Research Institute (RNII) and S.P. Korolyov became the Deputy Chief of the Institute. In 1934 S.P. Korolyov published the work " Rocket Flight in Stratosphere".