Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later

Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by arethuza on Thursday April 26, 2012 @05:17AM (#3893052)

Fascinating chap Sergei Korolev, denounced to the NKVD by colleagues over what sounds like office politics, tortured and sent to the Gulag for 10 years (including the awful Kolyma gold mining camps, which were some of the worst) rehabilitated and goes on to become arguably the greatest ever rocket designer - with a legacy that includes the ancestors of todays most succesful launchers used by the Russians and ESA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESAhistory/SEM7PZP11ZE_0.html

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Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by nodemaker on Thursday April 26, 2012 @10:46AM (#3894158)

"Following the fall of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov, the new chief Lavrenti Beria chose to retry Korolev on reduced charges in 1939, but by that time Korolev was on his way from prison to a gulag camp in the far east of Siberia, where he spent several months in a gold mine in the Kolyma area before word reached him of his retrial. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent back to Moscow, but he had already sustained injuries and had lost most of his teeth due to the labor camp's brutal conditions"

And I thought my life was hard!

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Re:Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later by arethuza on Thursday April 26, 2012 @11:01AM (#3894223)

I can recommend Anne Applebaum's history in addition, of course, to Solzhenitsyn's works:

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-A-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400...

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