Institut RABE (Missile Construction and Development in Bleicherode, Raketenbau und Entwicklung) was a group of German engineers founded by the Soviets to recreate the A-4 flight control system. It was created in July 1945 in Bleicherode when the Red Army took over Thuringia as part of the Soviet occupation zone. It originally consisted of 12 Germans under Major Boris Chertok and Lieutenant Colonel Aleksey Mikhaylovich Isayev. [1] The Institute RABE was created with the purpose of recruiting German rocket specialists to aid in current and future Soviet rocket development. This mission had to be kept secret, as the American-occupied territory of Hesse and Bavaria was not far away from Lehesten, the testing site for rocket engines. [2]
By the end of August 1945, the institute had settled into their headquarters (the former mansion of Wernher von Braun) but it lacked deeper knowledge of the Peenemünde developments because the US Army had seized a group of 450 specialists in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, among them von Braun's core group, and forced other specialists from Thuringia to the US Occupation Zone as part of the Operation Overcast. In August 1945, Chertok successfully completed his most important covert operation when he retrieved Helmut Gröttrup (the deputy for the electrical system and missile control) from American territory along with his family to set up a parallel Büro Gröttrup in Bleicherode. [3] [4] In February 1946 both the Institut RABE and the Büro Gröttrup were merged into the larger Institut Nordhausen, which had the goal of recreating the entire German A-4 rocket. This institute was headed by Sergei Korolev as the Soviet chief engineer and Helmut Gröttrup as the German director under Soviet military control. [5] In May 1946, the Zentralwerke combined the Institut Nordhausen, Institut Berlin (recreating the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile) and manufacturing sites of the earlier Mittelwerk in Thuringia.
In October 1946, during Operation Osoaviakhim, many sites for the development of weapons and aircraft in East Germany were closed and more than 2,300 German specialists were forcibly relocated for employment in the Soviet Union, among them about 200 specialists from Zentralwerke (500 people including their families). [6] They were moved to Podlipki (about 120 engineers) and Gorodomlya Island (about 40 engineers) as part of Korolev's NII-88 and later Soviet design bureau OKB-1, and to Khimki as part of Valentin Glushko's OKB-456 for developing rocket engines. [7]
The Peenemünde Army Research Center was founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office (Heereswaffenamt). Several German guided missiles and rockets of World War II were developed by the HVP, including the V-2 rocket. The works were attacked by the British in Operation Crossbow from August 1943, before falling to the Soviets in May 1945.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was the lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer during the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. He invented the R-7 Rocket, Sputnik 1, and was involved in the launching of Laika, Sputnik 3, the first human-made object to make contact with another celestial body, Belka and Strelka, the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into space, Voskhod 1, and the first person, Alexei Leonov, to conduct a spacewalk.
The R-7 Semyorka, officially the GRAU index 8K71, was a Soviet missile developed during the Cold War, and the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. The R-7 made 28 launches between 1957 and 1961 a derivative, the R-7A, was operational from 1960 to 1968. To the West it was unknown until its launch. In modified form, it launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit, and became the basis for the R-7 family which includes Sputnik, Luna, Molniya, Vostok, and Voskhod space launchers, as well as later Soyuz variants. Various modifications are still in use and it has become the world’s most reliable space launcher.
The R-1 rocket was a tactical ballistic missile, the first manufactured in the Soviet Union, and closely based on the German V-2 rocket. The R-1 missile system entered into service in the Soviet Army on 28 November 1950. Deployed largely against NATO, it was never an effective strategic weapon. Nevertheless, production and launching of the R-1 gave the Soviets valuable experience which later enabled the USSR to construct its own much more capable rockets.
The R-2 was a Soviet short-range ballistic missile developed from and having twice the range as the R-1 missile. Developed from 1946-1951, the R-2 entered service in numbers in 1953 and was deployed in mobile units throughout the Soviet Union until 1962. A sounding rocket derivative, the R-2A, tested a prototype of the dog-carrying capsule flown on Sputnik 2 in 1957. The same year, the R-2 was licensed for production in The People's Republic of China, where it entered service as the Dongfeng 1.
The Soviet space program was the national space program of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), active from 1955 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Georgy Nikolayevich Babakin was a Soviet engineer working in the space program. He was Chief Designer at the Lavochkin Design Bureau from 1965 until his death.
The R-5 Pobeda was a medium range ballistic missile developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The upgraded R-5M version, the first Soviet missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon, was assigned the NATO reporting name SS-3 Shyster and carried the GRAU index 8K51.
Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1950 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. After returning to West Germany in December 1953, he developed data processing systems, contributed to early commercial applications of computer science and coined the German term "Informatik". In 1967 Gröttrup invented the smart card as a "forgery-proof key" for secure identification and access control or storage of a secure key, also including inductive coupling for near-field communication (NFC). From 1970 he headed a start-up division of Giesecke+Devrient for the development of banknote processing systems and machine-readable security features.
Mittelwerk was a German World War II factory built underground in the Kohnstein to avoid Allied bombing. It used slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to produce V-2 ballistic missiles, V-1 flying bombs, and other weapons.
Boris Yevseyevich Chertok was a Russian engineer in the former Soviet space program, mainly working in control systems, and later found employment in Roscosmos.
Operation Osoaviakhim was a secret Soviet operation under which more than 2,500 former Nazi German specialists from companies and institutions relevant to military and economic policy in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and Berlin, as well as around 4,000 more family members, totalling more than 6,000 people, were transported from former Nazi Germany as war reparations to the Soviet Union. It took place in the early morning hours of October 22, 1946 when MVD and Soviet Army units under the direction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), headed by Ivan Serov, rounded up German scientists and transported them by rail to the USSR.
TsNIIMash is a Russian rocket and spacecraft scientific center, dealing with all phases of development from conceptual design to flight test. The Institute is the main analytical center of Roskosmos in the field of system-wide studies of the problems of the development of Russia's RKT with a wide range of tasks: from conceptual design and long-term prospects for the development of rocket and space technology to specific technological developments and their conversion in the interests of other industries. It was established in 1946.
Arkady Ilyich Ostashev was Soviet and Russian scientist, engineer in the former Soviet space program, working on as a designer many of rocket propulsion and control system of Soviet satellites. He was a participant in the launch of the first artificial satellite of the Earth and the first cosmonaut, Candidate of Technical Sciences, associate professor, laureate of the Lenin (1960) and State (1979) Prizes, one of the leading managers of work in the field of experimental development of rocket technology OKB-1, personal pensioner of republican significance, student and interpersonal relationship of Sergei Korolev.
Leonid Alexandrovich Voskresensky was a Soviet engineer in the Soviet space program, and long-time associate of Chief Designer Sergei Korolev. He served as launch director for Sputnik and for the first crewed space flight, Vostok 1. The lunar crater Voskresenskiy is named in his honor.
Soviet rocketry commenced in 1921 with development of Solid-fuel rockets, which resulted in the development of the Katyusha rocket launcher. Rocket scientists and engineers, particularly Valentin Glushko and Sergei Korolev, contributed to the development of Liquid-fuel rockets, which were first used for fighter aircraft. Developments continued in the late 1940s and 1950s with a variety of ballistic missiles and ICBMs, and later for space exploration which resulted in the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite ever launched.
Erich Apel worked during World War Two as a rocket engineer at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Nazi Germany. After his return from the Soviet Union, where he had forcibly worked for rocketry development under the Operation Osoaviakhim until 1952, he became an East German party official. During the later 1950s, he was increasingly involved in economic policy, serving from 1958 as head of the German Democratic Republic's Economics Commission in the Politburo. He was seen as a reformer. However, economic reform rapidly fell off the agenda after October 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev fell from power in Moscow.
Reactive Scientific Research Institute was one of the first Soviet research and development institutions to focus on rocket technology. RNII developed the Katyusha rocket launcher and its research and development were very important for later achievements of the Soviet rocket and space programs.
During World War II, Nazi Germany developed rocket technology that was more advanced than that of the Allies and a race commenced between the Soviet Union and the United States to capture and exploit the technology. Soviet rocket specialists were sent to Germany in 1945 to obtain V-2 rockets and worked with German specialists in Germany and later in the Soviet Union to understand and replicate the rocket technology. The involvement of German scientists and engineers was an essential catalyst to early Soviet efforts. In 1945 and 1946 the use of German expertise was invaluable in reducing the time needed to master the intricacies of the V-2 rocket, establishing production of the R-1 rocket and enabling a base for further developments. However, after 1947 the Soviets made very little use of German specialists and their influence on future Soviet rocketry was marginal.
At the Rabe Institute, Gröttrup was received warily. He was rather dismissive of the team of German specialists that he managed to gather there, speaking in favor of only the gyroscopeist Kurt Magnus and the electronics engineer Hans (Johannes) Hoch - he simply did not know the rest. In order not to inflame passions, it was decided to form a special "Bureau Gröttrup" (Büro Gröttrup), the first task of which was to compile a detailed report on the missile developments of Peenemünde.
By mid-1948, most German rocket specialists, who worked for NII-88 in Podlipki, ended up in the confines of the Gorodomlya Island on the Seliger Lake, some 200 miles northwest of Moscow in the region known as Upper Volga.