Sergei Korolev

Sergei Korolev was born in Zhytomyr in Ukraine and was designing gliders before he was 20. In the early 1930s he joined a small Moscow group building liquid-fuelled rockets, and in 1933 they launched the first Soviet rocket to fly on liquid fuel. The military took the group over, and Korolev rose fast.

In June 1938, at the height of Stalin's purges, he was arrested on false charges of sabotage. He was beaten during interrogation, sentenced to ten years and sent to the Kolyma gold mines in the far east, where prisoners died in their thousands. He lost his teeth to scurvy and was near death when he was recalled to Moscow, apparently because the state realised it needed its engineers. He spent the rest of the war in a prison design bureau under the aircraft designer Tupolev, and was released in 1944.

After the war he was put in charge of Soviet long-range rockets. His R-7, designed to carry a nuclear warhead, was the most powerful rocket in the world when it flew in 1957. Korolev persuaded the Kremlin to let him use one to launch a satellite. Sputnik went up on 4 October 1957 and the world changed overnight. The dog Laika followed, then Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, the first woman in space in 1963 and the first spacewalk in 1965.

Through all of it he was known only as the Chief Designer. His health had never recovered from the camps, and he died on an operating table in January 1966. Only then was his name printed.