His interest in reactive propulsion as a promising principle for aircraft engines, led him to join the Jet Propulsion Research Group - a state-sponsored rocketry center - which soon became the country’s leading rocket laboratory. As head of the group, Korolev led several successful projects involving liquid-propelled missiles. Their success record made the authorities merge the lab with another laboratory in Leningrad, in order to establish an institute for rocket technology (RNII), where Korolev attained the position of Deputy Chief Engineer.

The work of the new institute was interrupted in late 1930s, after Stalin launched a crackdown on the officers of the Red Army. The RNII was a creation of Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was shot on a false accusation in 1937, becoming one of the most prominent victims of the Great Purge. Many researchers at the institute were caught in the cogwheels too, and Korolev was no exception. Shortly after a near-fatal explosion in the laboratory, Korolev was arrested for “counter-revolutionary political activities” and deliberately harming the work of the institute – both accusations were often used in the terror campaign. He was tortured to extract a confession, and then sentenced to ten years in labor camps, and sent to a gold mine in Eastern Siberia.

Korolev’s health deteriorated after the beatings and harsh conditions of the camp. His morale was crippled by the injustice of his punishment, and for the rest of his life he acquired a cynical and gloomy attitude towards life. Colleagues recalled that his favorite saying was, “they’ll shoot us dead without an obituary”. He almost died in Siberia, due to malnutrition and disease. However, fate smiled upon him, when Mikhail Usachev - former head of Moscow’s aviation plant - was brought to the same camp. Thanks to his boxing skills and strong character, he was put in charge of the other inmates and convinced the prison authorities to put Korolev, whom he knew well, into favored conditions.

Four months later, thanks to the efforts of Korolev’s family and friends, he was summoned to Moscow for re-trial. And once again he barely dodged death, when he missed a ship going to Vladivostok. The vessel was caught in a storm and ran aground, and all 740 prisoners on board perished. The retrial still found Korolev guilty, but instead of a labor camp he was sent to a “sharashka” - a closed institution where inmates with a scientific background were forced to work on military projects. Korolev was sent to the one headed by Tupolev, also now a convict, where he helped develop the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber and the Petlyakov Pe-2 dive bomber.

In 1942, Korolev, who initiated several rocket projects under Tupolev’s supervision, was transferred to another prison laboratory - headed by his former co-worker at the RNII, Valentin Glushko - which was dedicated to rocket technology. Two years later, the scientist was released, and continued his work on rocket engines as a free man. It was only in 1957, however, nine years before his death, that the charges against him were dropped.

After the defeat of the Nazi Germany in 1945, Korolev was sent, with a group of scientists, to salvage what was left of the German rocket research studies. While the US managed to take leading scientists, including Wernher von Braun, out of the country, the Soviets got specialists involved in the mass production of the V-2 missile. Korolev was put in charge of replicating the missile, which he successfully did by 1947. His work on improving the range and throw weight of Soviet ballistic missiles led to several breakthroughs, culminating in the creation of the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with nuclear warhead: the two-stage R-7 (Sapwood) in 1957.

Starting from the mid-1950s, Korolev promoted the idea of using the achievements in rocketry for space exploration. In 1956, his design bureau became an independent institute. A year later, the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite of Earth, became a propaganda triumph, as well as a great scientific breakthrough. The event, which caught the West unawares, started the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Korolev’s research set a string of space “firsts”: the first animal launch, the first mapping of the dark side of the Moon, the first manned flight into space, and the first spacewalk.

These triumphs, however, were somewhat marred by the fact that Korolev’s contribution was not publicly acknowledged. Legend has it that when the Nobel committee sent a request for the names of the people who were to be praised for the launch of Sputnik, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev replied it was “the Soviet People” rather than particular scientists. For many years, it was first man in space Yury Gagarin, rather than Sergey Korolev, who was “the face” of the space program. Even insiders rarely referred to Korolev by his name, preferring to refer to a mysterious “Chief Designer”. The first official report on his work as a prominent rocket engineer was in his obituary.

By the time of his premature death in 1966, Korolev had ambitious plans for a manned mission to the Moon, and a permanent orbiting space station. The Soyuz spacecraft, which, after several modifications, is still in use today, was Korolev’s creation for these projects. He also had prepared a design for creating artificial gravity in orbit by rotating a couple of linked spacecraft against a common center, and envisioned orbital construction of a huge spaceship for a manned mission to Mars.

Overzealous in his work, meticulous and demanding, with a hot temper and a stubborn conviction in his ideas, Sergey Korolev was both feared and loved by his subordinates. Even bitter rival designers like Vladimir Chelomei, Valentin Glushko and Mikhail Yangel acknowledged his fantastic intuition in technical issues. Korolev was also somewhat superstitious. He had his “lucky suit” to wear for rocket launches, as well as a couple of lucky coins, which he carried in his pocket.

Korolev died of a heart attack after an operation on a tumor, two days after his 59th birthday. Three years later, America became the first, and so far only, nation to send a man to the Moon.

The last manned mission beyond low Earth orbit took place in late 1972.

Korolev’s work today:

Thanks to Korolev, space was turned into a race track for the superpowers, with billions of dollars pumped into the rapid progress. The practical applications spurring from the race range from satellite communication to modern computers.

Many technologies still used for space exploration today were conceived by Korolev.

On the military side, Korolev was praised for creating successful delivery systems, including portable ballistic missiles. Being mutually vulnerable, the superpowers avoided direct confrontation during the Cold War.

From childhood he possessed an inquisitive and well-organized mind, which captured complex ideas easily. An anecdotal account says that, during his study in Moscow University, he received a ‘C’ for his explanation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Professor Igor Tamm, who conducted the exam, said the student “didn’t have a clue” about the material, but the following night Tamm called his fellow examiner to say, “Hey, it’s we who don’t have a clue and should get a C, not that student”. However much truth the story holds, Tamm became Sakharov’s teacher and later a colleague in the Soviet hydrogen bomb project.

Sakharov is commonly dubbed “the father of H-bomb,” a title the scientist said was inaccurate since it undermined the contribution of his co-workers. Nevertheless his contribution was crucial for the success of the project. Sakharov conceived the design of the fist thermonuclear device tested in the country in 1953. For this work Sakharov was elected as a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, becoming the youngest academician of the time.

Later, the team independently developed a design similar to that used in the American nuclear weapons program, and proved that the hydrogen bomb had no principal limit to the yield of its blast. The research culminated in the 1961 test of the Tsar-bomb. This 50-megaton monster was detonated over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in a political move. On Sakharov’s insistence, the initial yield was halved, but the resulting blast was still strong enough for the blast wave to circumnavigate the Earth three times.

In a spin-off project Sakharov created an explosively pumped flux compression generator, a device which uses chemical explosives to create a powerful pulse of magnetic field. Among other areas, the technology has its application in electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) weapons which damage electronic devices. Yet another military design by the scientist was a giant torpedo with a powerful nuclear warhead and a nuclear-powered engine, which Sakharov depicts in his memoirs. He says the idea was called “cannibalistic” by one Navy officer and was never pursued.

Together with Tamm, Sakharov worked on the peaceful application of nuclear fusion too. They conceived the ‘tokomak’, a device for confining high-temperature plasma using a powerful toroidal magnetic field. The design is being used in one of the biggest international scientific projects under construction now: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. It’s hoped that it will give scientists enough data to develop the technology into a commercial source of power that neither needs expensive uranium fuel, nor produces radioactive waste.

Sakharov, in the Soviet Union, went the same way as American physicists involved in the Manhattan Project, who started public campaigning against their own creation. Like Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Harold Urey, Andrey Sakharov saw the approaching doom that nuclear weapons brought with them. He used his weight in scientific circles and the Soviet government to stand against the build-up of nuclear arsenals, and to raise concern of the environmental dangers of nuclear tests. His effort was behind Moscow’s agreement to the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which limited nuclear detonations to underground tests only. In the late 1960s, he campaigned for a ban of antiballistic missile defense systems, arguing they would give the Soviet and American governments a false sense of security, and raise the likelihood of a total nuclear war.

His position, as well as starting public discussion of highly political issues, made him fall out of favor with top officials. After his key essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Co-existence, and Intellectual Freedom” was leaked out of the country and published in the West, he was banned from military research. Sakharov resorted to studies in fundamental science, and wrote several daring papers on the structure of the universe and the nature of gravity.

At the same time, he became more and more involved in public activities, campaigning against political persecution, the use of psychiatric institutions against dissidents, immigration restrictions and other violations of human rights by the Soviet authorities. He called for the convergence of socialist and capitalist systems based on universal respect for human life, unobstructed exchange of information, freedom of conscience and democracy. His vision of a “Universal Information System”, published in 1974, is accurate in many details of its description of the modern Internet.

Sakharov’s newfound passion was shared by his second wife Elena Bonner, whom he married in 1972. In response, a smear campaign against them both was launched in society. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but was not allowed to leave the country, so Bonner traveled to Norway to collect it and deliver Sakharov’s Nobel speech on behalf of her husband.

The non-compromising position of the couple finally led to a devastating strike by the authorities. After Sakharov harshly objected to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and called for an international boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, the Sakharovs were internally exiled to the city of Gorky - now Nizhny Novgorod - where no foreigners could travel. The scientist, who was one of only 16 people in all Soviet history to receive the highest state award for civil work the maximum three times, was further humiliated when he was stripped of all his decorations. Another blow for Sakharov was that his fellow dissidents with a position in the scientific world did nothing to protest his exile.

For six years, Sakharov was living in near-isolation in a wire-tapped apartment. Only after Gorbachev’s reform campaign was he allowed to return to Moscow and continue his public work. In late 1980s, he was a deputy in the new parliament, and prepared a draft of a new constitution. On December 14, 1989, his heart failed. A doctor who did the autopsy noted that Sakharov had an inherited cardiac defect, and had had little chance of making it to his 50th birthday. He died at the age of 69.

In one of his books, Sakharov described his life principle thus: “Life, with its casual relationships, is so complex that pragmatic criteria often become useless, leaving us only with moral ones.”

Sakharov’s work today:

While Sakharov himself said that his humanitarian ideals - of all mankind united by respect for life - may seem naïve, they are no less appealing today than they were decades ago.

Sakharov’s works in thermonuclear power may be the key to abundant, cheap and virtually inexhaustible energy.

History may have no place for “what ifs”, but without Sakharov, the Cold War could have spiraled out of control, bringing an end to our civilization.

Vladimir Kremlev for RT

Encouraged by the boy’s crafty designs, his father, an impoverished gentry of Polish origin, agreed to pay for his education in Moscow, but for whatever reason Tsiolkovsky failed to enter the technical school there. He decided to stay and educate himself by reading books at the city’s only free public library. Of the small allowance his father sent him monthly, Konstantin spent but a fraction on food and clothing, buying books, chemical reagents and tools on the rest. After his return, Tsiolkovsky began to earn his living with private tutoring, and later passed official exams to get the position of a teacher at a state school.

Most of his life Tsiolkovsky received little acknowledgement for his scientific works. His experiments in provincial Russian town of Borovsk and later in the city of Kaluga gave him the reputation of a crazy inventor among locals. Recalling his experience of using a small sail when skiing on a frozen river, he says he spooked horses and people cursed at him, but failed to notice it due to his poor hearing. Nor did the good citizens approve his building of models of hot air aerostats, fearing potential fires.

The main focus of his early research was aviation and dirigibles in particular. His favorite idea was to build a huge fully metal rigid airship with changing volume, which would be kept afloat by hot air rather than hydrogen. For many years Tsiolkovsky failed to get any funding for the ambitious project, and his own income was enough only for small-scale models.

Decades later in 1931, when the scientist was famous and praised in the Soviet Union, a large test model was built, but the metal airship was too demanding on materials and was not feasible. The Mayakovskaya station of the Moscow metro is decorated with details derived from the project.

In the late 1880s Tsiolkovsky wrote his first fiction book, which depicted what one can experience on the Moon. While far from having a sophisticated plot and allowing the main characters to do without spacesuits, the book gave a lot of detail on how the environment with lower gravity and no air is different from life on Earth.

In the last decade of the 19th century Tsiolkovsky wrote his first serious papers on space exploration and rocketry. He believed that vehicles moved by reactive propulsion were the most promising way of reaching the space and moving in vacuum. Later he outlined basic principles on rocket engine construction, including the use of liquid hydrogen and oxygen for propulsion and attitude thrusters for control. His research was hardly known outside of the country, but it gave inspiration to domestic scientists. To honor the contribution to rocket science, the equation relating the movement of an ideal rocket with its mass, the mass of the fuel and the exhaust velocity is named after Tsiolkovsky.

His further theories on space travel predicted the creation of permanent orbital stations powered by solar energy. He coined the idea of multiple stage rockets, even though he erroneously envisioned a train of separate vehicles engaged in multiple in-flight refueling operations to make the final stage reach orbit. Another idea of his was an orbital lift, which would greatly reduce the cost of delivering loads into space. It is yet to be put into practice, because there are no materials with the necessary strength available currently.

Less known to the public are Tsiolkovsky’s controversial philosophical works, where he put forward ideas of eugenics and the rule of geniuses. For him going into space was natural for humanity, as it expands thanks to new technology, but he was with the transhumanism adepts, believing that humankind must actively direct its evolution to make individual people independent from their environment and potentially immortal.

There is also controversy over Tsiolkovsky’s relations with the communist authorities. In the newborn union the self-educated provincial schoolteacher making discoveries through sheer dedication and strength of mind was too good a propaganda figure for the soviets. Even his noble ancestors had been “forgotten”. Some critics say his scientific legacy is exaggerated and his woks were, in many regards, secondary and lacked academic value. However, many rocket engineers from Wernher von Braun to Sergey Korolev praised Tsiolkovsky as the man who showed them direction.

His dream of mankind finally leaving the proverbial cradle of Earth inspired many, and some of his predictions were astoundingly accurate. And who knows what other of his ideas may come true in the future?

Tsiolkovsky’s work today:

From the US flag on the Moon to the communication satellites linking people across continents, humanity’s breaking into space is Tsiolkovsky’s vision being realized.

Tsiolkovsky believed that humanity must be united to conquer the solar system and go beyond. The International Space Station is one of the biggest projects where many nations now work together on one common goal.

While you probably have not been able to get your hands on a space elevator or a metal-clad airship, both have become recurring themes in science fiction, from Arthur C. Clarke to manga series Hellsing.