This week SPACE.com takes a look at great rocketeers who helped spur humanity’s race into space:

Two scientists on different sides of the Cold War led rival efforts to launch humans on Moonward during the Space Race.

In the U.S., working with NASA, was a rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (left), who pioneered the V-2 rocket system for Germany during World War 2 and surrendered to Americans at the end of the conflict.

Leading the Soviet Union’s space effort was Sergei Korolev, originally denounced and imprisoned during the Stalin era purges, who served as Chief Designer for Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missile program and later spearheaded the superpower’s manned spaceflight project.

Despite his novel ambitions of human spaceflight, orbital stations and exploration, von Braun’s work was clouded by his role as an honorary S.S. officer in the Nazi Party as he and his team developed the V-2 weapon in World War 2. He worked first with the U.S. Army to develop ballistic missiles, then moved to NASA and oversaw the development of the Saturn 5 – the towering rocket that ultimately sent astronauts to the Moon.

While von Braun’s NASA work was publicly visible, Korolev’s was shrouded in a secrecy so tight that it stunned the world on Oct. 4, 1957 when an R-7 rocket launched Sputnik – the first artificial satellite – into orbit.  Korolev died in surgery and did not live to see his version of von Braun’s Saturn 5 Moon rocket – the N-1 booster. But the N-1 suffered serious failures during four test launches, which ended Russia’s lunar ambitions.

After his death, Korolev was given a state funeral and revealed to the Soviet public and world at large as the driving force behind the nation’s space effort.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: NASA (left)/The City of Korolev.