Sergei Korolev - Death

Death

On 3 December 1960, Korolev suffered his first heart attack. During his convalescence, it was also discovered that he was suffering from a kidney disorder, a condition brought on by his detention in the Soviet prison camps. He was warned by the doctors that if he continued to work as intensely as he had, he would not live long. However Korolev reasoned that once the Soviets lost their leadership in space, the capricious Khrushchev would likely cut off the funding for his programs. So he continued to work - now even more intensely than before.

By 1962 Sergei Korolev's health problems were beginning to accumulate and he was suffering from numerous ailments. He had a bout of intestinal bleeding that led to him being taken to the hospital in an ambulance. In 1964 doctors diagnosed him with cardiac arrhythmia. In February he spent ten days in the hospital after a heart problem. Shortly after he was suffering from inflammation of his gallbladder. The mounting pressure of his workload was also taking a heavy toll, and he was suffering from a lot of fatigue. Korolev was also growing deaf, perhaps due to much exposure to noise from rocket engine tests.

The actual circumstances of Korolev's death remain somewhat uncertain. In December 1965, he was supposedly diagnosed with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine. He entered the hospital on 5 January 1966 for somewhat routine surgery. He died nine days later. It was stated by the government that he had what turned out to be a large, cancerous tumor in his abdomen. But Glushko later reported that he actually died due to a poorly performed operation for hemorrhoids. According to Harford, Korolev's family confirmed the cancer story. His weak heart next contributed to his demise—Korolev never regained consciousness after the operation. When doctors tried to intubate him to assist his breathing, they found they could not do so due to the heavy damage done to his jaw by the beatings he received in the gulag.

Under a policy initiated by Stalin and continued by his successors, the identity of Korolev was never revealed until after his death. The purported reason was to protect him from foreign agents from the United States. As a result, the Soviet people didn't become aware of his accomplishments until after his death. His obituary was published in the Pravda newspaper on 16 January 1966, showing a photograph of Korolev with all his medals. Korolev's ashes were interred with state honors in the Kremlin Wall.

Korolev is often compared to Wernher von Braun as the leading architect of the Space Race. Unlike von Braun, Korolev had to compete continually with rivals, such as Vladimir Chelomei, who had their own plans for flights to the Moon. He also had to work with technology that in many aspects was less advanced than what was available in the United States, particularly in electronics and computers.

Korolev's successor in the Soviet space program was Vasily Mishin. Mishin was a quite competent engineer who had served as Korolev's deputy and right-hand man. After Korolev died, Mishin became the Chief Designer, and he inherited what turned out to be a flawed N1 rocket program. In 1972, Mishin was fired and then replaced by a rival, Valentin Glushko, after all four N-1 test launches failed. By that time, the rival Americans had already made it to the Moon, and so the program was canceled by CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.