The Unnamed

On October 3, 1957, the Soviets stunned the world by surprise launching an artificial satellite. Sputnik 1 carried no instruments, but its petulant beep served as a highly effective propaganda message and warning to the capitalists. Just what Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to stabilize his own chair and promote communism abroad. The man who gave the USSR this primacy was a Ukrainian engineer, Sergei Korolev. Once a member of a group of patriotic university students seduced by space, then a victim of the Stalinist purges, he had been fished out after the Second World War to steal V2 secrets from German prisoners, then rehabilitated to work on a rocket capable of delivering a nuclear warhead overseas to even the score with NATO on the strategic level. His creature, the R-7 rocket enjoyed such an upswing, thanks to four boosters fired at takeoff and then released, that it was proposed to launch the satellite that the Americans, still in melted water, planned to put into orbit for the International Year of Geophysics. The enterprise was so successful that Korolev became an asset to be defended as a state secret: a chief designer without a name and a face.