From Huntsville to Baikonur

A Trail Blazed by S.P.Korolev

Jesco von Puttkamer

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Washington, DC, 20546, USA

 

Sergey Pavlovich Korolev was the creative genius and driving motor behind the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R7 "Semyorka", the world's first artificial satellite, the first "Lunik" moon probes, the first "Venera" probe to Venus (entering for the first time the atmosphere of another planet, making a soft landing and returning images) and the world's first human space voyager, Yuri Gagarin.љљ With these accomplishments, Korolev clearly played a significant role as motivating force behind the space accomplishments of the United States, too.љ For NASA's major early programs Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, topped off by six successful lunar landings, he can be considered as a trailblazer.

 

From the personal view of the author, who has been with NASA since joining the rocket development team of Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1962, much of our early efforts and continuing throughout the Cold War years, was spurred by the competitive desire to catch up and surpass the Soviet Firsts in Space, with which Sergey Pavlovich and his colleagues stunned the world.љ This paper gives a brief overview of these efforts, reflecting the indubitable similarities of von Braun and Korolev and the latter's impacts on our spaceflight developments, leading from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the first manned launch in 1961 to our first joint earth-orbital mission of the Apollo Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in 1975, the Shuttle/Mir phase of the International Space Station (ISS) in 1994-1998 and today's dependable ISS partnership of USA and Russia, along with over a dozen other countries.љ

 

As we are now preparing to tackle the difficult job of going to the moon and on to Mars and beyond, it is hoped that all partners involved will keep these two remarkable men foremost in our mind as role models.

 

 

Jesco von Puttkamer, Prof., Dr.; Program Manager at NASA Headquarters (HQ), Washington, DC, working today on the International Space Station (ISS) Program, responsible for HQ oversight and performance evaluation of daily ISS on-orbit operations, Russian activities, and the Russian ISS segment. He has been with NASA for 45 years, after emigrating from Germany in 1962 and starting as a young aerospace engineer in the rocket development team of Dr. Wernher von Braun at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. He became a US citizen in 1967 and relocated to NASA management in Washington in 1974. His honorary Doctorate and Professor degrees were earned in Germany.