At the age of twenty-two, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev met Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the "Father of Cosmonautics." Korolev was so impressed by the Tsiolkovsky's ideas that he pledged to devote his entire life to making space travel a reality.
After graduating from the elite Moscow Higher Technical School, Korolev was placed in charge of the design and production department of the Group for the Study of Rocket Propulsion Systems (GIRD). A year later, he launched Russia's first liquid-fuel rocket. By the age of thirty-eight, he was already the Soviets' foremost expert in jet and rocket design, and was well on his way to making space travel a reality. But Joseph Stalin, the USSR's leader, forced Korolev to detour by deciding that GIRD should work on weapons and not on space travel.
After the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, near the end of World War II, Stalin pushed for a Soviet atomic bomb. And he wanted Korolev to design a rocket that could send such a bomb around the world. By 1952, Korolev had concocted the T-2, a type of Intermediate Range Missile, and by 1954 he unveiled his R-7 booster, the Semyorka, the world's first true Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). This machine fulfilled the wishes of the Soviet high command, but Korolev saw another use for it. He knew that such a rocket could become the spaceship that Tsiolkovsky had dreamed of fifty-six years earlier.
Despite Stalin's demand that rockets be used only for military work, Korolev used the military rockets to perform scientific work. He launched his own variation of the World War II German V-2 rocket to explore the upper atmosphere, and by 1952 he was sending dogs dressed in space suits to the limits of the atmosphere. Rocket boosters pushed the small craft as high into the upper atmosphere as they could, and then parachutes opened and rocked the dogs gently back to Earth. Little cameras clicked pictures of the dogs to learn the effects of space travel on living things. Stalin's death in 1953 finally gave Korolev the freedom to step completely away from the union of atomic bomb and rocket that he had helped forge and to prepare instead a nonmilitary, satellite launch vehicle.
