The Rise and Fall of The Apollo Program | Two Paths: Sergei Korolev and AS-204
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (12 January 1907 - 23 September 1985) was a Soviet rocket engineer who served as chief designer for the Soviet Union's space program during the Space Race between it and the United States from the 1950s to the early 1980s. He invented the R-7 rocket, oversaw the development of Sputnik 1, and was involved in launching the first dog, Laika, into orbit, the first man-made object to land on another celestial body, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit, the first person to walk in space,Alexei Leonov, and the first Russian and third man to walk on the moon, also Leonov, a mere two weeks after the launch of Apollo 8.
Born in modern day Ukraine in the Russian Empire, Korolev evaded death in the late 1930s working at the infamous Kolyma labor camp. After his release, he quickly gained recognition as a rocket scientist and became a key figure in developing the Soviet ICBM program. He designed the first such ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka and later directed the Soviet space program, overseeing it officially from 1955 until his retirement in 1979. He oversaw the early successes of the Sputnik and Vostok programs as well as the short-lived Voshod program. After U.S. president John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to land a man on the moon by the year 1970, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev would quickly assign the space program to start on their own moon program with the N-1-L3, the most powerful rocket at the time, by early 1963.
Korolev faced conflict with other engineers in the program for the 1960s, only conceding in some aspects such as his desire of an all-up test of the vehicle, instead going with an incramental test of each rocket stage after an incident involving a dynamic test vehicle in early 1966. In August 1969, two weeks after the launch of Apollo 8, the first Soviet manned landing on the moon, Zvezda 5 would launch. Alexei Leonov became the third man to walk on the moon and the first Soviet to do so. After the Zvezda proxu,rgram ended in 1975, Korolev stayed on has chief designer, reccomending a mission to Mars that was developed only after his death. He served until his retirement from failing health in 1979. He died in 1985 at the age of 78. His name was put out to the Soviet public and outside world for the first time after his death.
The AS-204 fire, more popularly known as the Apollo fire, was an incident that occured on January 19, 1967. Initially meant as the first manned mission of the Apollo Program, launching on February 21, 1967, the Command and Service Module, CSM-012, given the callsign Liberty, had caught fire on Launch Complex-34 during an uncrewed test meant as a "dry-run". The crew, Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger Chaffee, were training in a simulator away from the capsule when the fire occured. In the pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule, a fire broke out that burned for several minutes before pad workers were able to open the hatch. The program was put on pause, only launching unmanned flights of the Saturn V, and Lunar Module on the newly renamed Apollos 1, 2, and 3 before the first manned flight, Apollo 4, was launched in October 1968, carrying the backup crew, Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham.