TRANSCRIPT OF PART 1 OF 60 YEARS OF THE SPACE RACE: SERGEI KOROLEV THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND
The journey of human beings into the
final frontier of outer space began with the work of two brilliant men at the
Beginning of the 20th Century.
Both men had worked for their
respective governments the technological leaders of the time Germany and
Russia, to build never before seen rocket weapons of awesome power during the most destructive conflict of human
history. World War 2.
Deep down, both of these legendary
pioneers of rocket technology believed in a shining vision of a human future in
Outer Space although their inventions created in utmost secrecy and surrounded
by controversy to this day could have completely eradicated any hopes for a
human future in space before the journey to the stars could even begin.
One of them worked for the Nazi's.
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| Wernher von Braun the the German Army |
***
I believe deserve they title of
“Legends of Humanity” in the same league as Newton, Beethoven, Nietzsche, and of
course Kanye.
They were men who looked up despite
the harsh troubles of the times during the 1930s until the heydays of the Space
Race that they would largely influence. Against all odds both of these men would
break free from the chains of nationalistic thinking of their Governments’ that
mired their early work to usher in a new age of human history.
They
were The Rocket Men
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| Sergei Korolev and Vernher von Braun |
***
From the now collapsed communist
superpower of the Soviet Union came Sergei
Pavlovich Korolev. A man so steeped in mystery those who worked with him
would only refer to him as “The King” or “The Big Boss”. His true identity was
declared a Soviet secret by the Ruling Communist Party for fear that the
Americans would send an Assassin to take him out. But we now know that he kind
of looked like Josh Hutcherson. So imagine Peeta Melark as a Soviet rocket
engineer. Haha…
In any press broadcasts of Soviet
achievements in the field of Rocket technology he was referred to as the
“Chief” Designer. The mysteriousness of the man behind early Soviet Success in
Space only heightened the anxiety of America and its Allies regarding the
potency of Soviet involvement in outer Space. “The Chief Designer” would later
play a major role in getting the first human into space. Yuri Gagarin.
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| Dont mess with the Chief Designer |
***
Sergei Korolev Born in 1907 in
Ukraine and Educated in Moscow. Sergei Korolev spent his early career as an
aircraft designer before recognizing the potential of rockets as vehicles on
their own right and as a means of traveling beyond the atmosphere of planet
Earth and into the unknown of outer space.
With World War 2 tension widening in
the 1930s Russian Military strategists turned to him to exploit the potential
of rockets as tactical battlefield weapons. These basic rockets would be the
precursors of the much larger ICBMs Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that
are these large and scary things that could be used to influence a war on not just
a small scale tactical level on individual battlefields but on a much larger
global strategic level. We’re lucky they haven’t been used yet for that
purpose.
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The Soviets put Sergei Korolev along
with other rocket engineers like Valentin Glushko, and Ivan Kleymenov to work
from secret factories in St. Petersburg and Moscow designing rockets that could
perform rudimentary tasks such as delivering bombs, measuring the weather and
perhaps one day exploring space. While most of his comrades focused on
designing fuel thrust chambers and fuel pumps, Korolev focused on rockets that
could carry payloads driven by guidance systems. He aimed at designing rockets
that would be practical.
Work was going well until 1937 when a
certain Madman with a Moustache, no no the other one, yeah that’s the one; Joseph Stalin enacted
his Great Purge; where he got rid of members of the Communist Party that he
deemed undesirable and a threat to his regime, an unfortunate and untimely
event for Korolev. These purges are real nasty business within the old ways of
the USSR, as an example Marshal Mikhail Tuchashevsky Korolev’s Boss at the time
was arrested on June 11 and shot dead the same day.
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| Purge the Unclean! |
***
Joseph Stalin was suspicious of
“independent minded” soldiers within the rocket program. All the rocket
engineers of the Reaction Propulsion Laboratory in Moscow including Korolev and
Glushko were arrested and charged with treason. In 1938 they were all sentenced
to nearly 10 years of hard labor in Siberian. Nearly a death sentence for the
men that only a few years before were prided as top scientists and engineers of
the Soviet Union.
The years spent in a Soviet Gulag would
have normally broken any ordinary man. I mean I spent 5 years in MMU and I’m
pretty messed up. Soviet Correctional Labour Camps were plagued with harsh
weather and were normally located in the Arctic North or the Siberian East away
from any civilization. The inmates would be forced to build roads and mine for
minerals with bad tools and barely any meals in between Ramadan x10. While not
as bad as Hitler’s death camps like Auschwitz the Gulags were renowned for
their harsh conditions.
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| Kolyma, still preferable to Auschwitz |
It was definitely no place for a
Sunday picnic. Regardless of the miserable conditions at Kolyma with mortality
rates among prisoners within the thousands, this would not be the last we would
see of Sergei Korolev.
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