Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [60]
Aeronautical engineering was still a relatively new field in 1925, and Korolev enrolled at the Polytechnical Institute of Kiev, which produced such graduates as Igor Sikorsky, the future helicopter designer. In Kiev, Korolev entered a small and obsessive community of aircraft builders, reveling in the heady, hands-on atmosphere, working late into the night and on weekends. He designed and built another glider, which he flew himself, and by his sophomore year his grades were good enough to transfer to the more prestigious Higher Technical School in Moscow, where his mother and stepfather had just moved from Odessa.
In Moscow, Korolev studied under the great Andrei Tupolev, who was already emerging as Russia’s most prolific designer of large-frame aircraft. Under Tupolev, Korolev designed his first motorized cub plane as a graduation project in 1930. It was an ungainly snub-nosed craft with a squat twenty-two-foot fuselage and a top speed of one hundred miles per hour. He called it the SK-4 and proudly painted a dark racing stripe down the side of the prototype. Alas, the SK-4 crashed on its third flight. “To my dear friend Piotr Frolov,” Korolev inscribed a photo of the wreckage to a fellow student, “in memory of our joint collaboration on this unhappy machine.”
The SK-4’s technical shortcomings showed Korolev’s limitations as a designer. He did not have the artistry, flair, or intuitive vision of others in his graduating class, and his first real job, working on hydroplanes, was not a particularly plum assignment. What Korolev did possess, however, was an uncanny knack for spotting talent, which he did during a chance encounter at a glider club outing in October 1931, when he met two rocket enthusiasts, Friedrich Tsander and Mikhail Tikhonravov. Tsander was a Latvian of German extraction, twenty years older than Korolev, and the founder of a rapidly growing volunteer rocket association called the Group for Studying Reaction Propulsion, or GIRD, whose branches would spread to ninety Soviet cities. Tsander had been a disciple of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky and the author of a popular tract on interplanetary travel. Eloquent and obsessed, sickly and impoverished, Tsander had a Rasputin-like hold on a legion of young Soviet scientists, who pooled funds to support his research.
Tikhonravov, on the other hand, was shy and unassuming—his name fittingly translates as Quietman—and he was not blessed with the ephemeral qualities that make inspirational leaders. But he possessed acute faculties, a reputation for deep thoughts, and “the air of a man who had already sampled the mysteries of another planet,” in the words of the British historian Deborah Cadbury. Classically trained in French and Latin, Tikhonravov would coin the term cosmonaut, Latin for “space traveler,” leaving the United States to settle for the slightly less accurate astronaut, or “star traveler,” to distinguish its spacemen, though stars, of course, could not be traveled to.
Tsander in 1931 had been working on a small rocket engine, and Korolev hit upon the idea of grafting it to a tailless, trapezoidal glider that he had used from time to time while training to qualify for his pilot’s license. The suggestion marked the first hint of where the future Chief Designer’s real talents lay: as an organizer, pulling together other people’s inventions. It was also his first spark of a dawning realization that rockets could have immediate and practical applications. Attached to wings, they could assist heavily loaded bombers to take off from short runways.
Korolev threw himself into the project with his customary vigor, taking only a day off to marry Ksenia, his high school sweetheart from Odessa, in a rushed civil ceremony that set the low-priority tone for their unhappy union of competing careers. After a few hurried