At the peak of the Cold War, the CIA was chasing a Soviet mastermind who kept beating America to every milestone in space, and they did not even know his name. To cosmonauts he was simply SP or the Chief Designer. This episode follows Sergei Korolev from a lonely childhood in Ukraine and an air show in Odessa in 1913 to the founding of the rocket group GIRD, the Soviet Union's first liquid-fueled rocket in 1933, and the arrest during Stalin's purges that nearly killed him.

We trace his survival in the Kolyma gold mines, the broken jaw and scurvy he carried for life, his rescue into a sharashka prison design bureau, and his refusal to copy captured German V-2 technology. We explain how his Council of Chief Designers bypassed Soviet bureaucracy, how the clustered-engine R-7 was sold to the military as a missile but built for orbit, and how he ...