Sergei Korolev

"Why congratulate me? We are miners, no one knows our names, we work underground."

"The further conquest of space will make it possible, for example, to create systems of satellites making daily revolutions around our planet at an altitude of some 40,000 kilometers, and to assure universal communications and the relaying of radio and television transmissions. There is no such thing as an unsolvable problem."

"The time will come when a spacecraft carrying human beings will leave the earth and set out on a voyage to distant planets to remote worlds. Today this may seem only an enticing fantasy, but such in fact is not the case. The launching of the first two Soviet Sputniks has already thrown a sturdy bridge from the earth into space, and the way to the stars is open."

"Anyone can build complicated. Our actions are determined by simplicity."

"Today the dreams of the best sons of mankind have come true. The assault on space has begun."

"{{Translated quote"

"He was one of the very best."

"The Soviets deliberately created their own geographic confusion, trying to conceal the location of their manned space center. By 1957, CIA spy planes had spotted the pad near the Central Asian railway station of Tyura-Tam, which CIA analysts proceeded to misspell forever after as "Tyuratam." In 1961, the Soviets, in a vain attempt at ex post facto geographic disinformation, named their launch site "Baikonur," which was itself a clumsy transliteration of Baikonyr, a small mining village hundreds of miles from the space base. When Kazakhstan became autonomous in 1991 and took nominal sovereignty over the spaceport, its leaders began referring to it as "Baikonyr." Perhaps someday the Russians can drop the now- admitted fraud once and for all and name the space base for the man who founded it, Sergei Korolev; then all the world's maps could carry a single -- and honorable -- designation."

"He was very positive; it was inside him. He tried to attract different people of all levels beginning from the worker. In his work place there was everybody. I worked in the competitive design bureau, but I met with him many times. I have nothing against him, but I had this feeling, which was bringing me to him, because he was the person who could make everybody work for him, and not really pressing them for it."