Karim Karimov oversaw development of Soviet manned space programme
Moscow, April 12 (AZERTAC). 50 Years ago on April 12,1961 the era of Human spaceflight opened with a roar to the heavens above with the thunderous blastoff of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard the Vostok 1 capsule.
Today we should to honor the memory of those who made great contributions to development of cosmonautics.
One of them is Karim Karimov, who worked as chairman of the Soviet Aeronautics Commission.
Karimov was born in Azerbaijan. He grew up in Baku and began his aeronautics career after a distinguished wartime military record. He was involved in the race that took place in 1945 between the Soviet, American and British intelligence to seize Nazi Germany`s rocket designers. The Americans came off best when they took Wernher von Braun, designer of the V-2 that bombarded London, and his team.
Karimov was at a disadvantage because Joseph Stalin was not interested in space. He had earlier blocked the research of two scientists who were to become the architects of the Soviet space programme, Nikolai Tupolev and Sergei Korolyov.
Karimov and Korolyov were with an intelligence group that scoured Germany for rocket parts. They retrieved enough to reconstruct 10 missiles and launched seven of them in 1950 with a 600-kilometre range. Two years later Korolyov`s team produced rockets capable of 1500 kilometres. This showed that an intercontinental missile with a 10,000-kilometre range was only a matter of time and opened up the possibility of launching an orbiting satellite (something that was achieved with Sputnik I in October 1957).
After experiments with dogs in space were successful, Korolyov got the Soviet leadership`s support to send a human up. Karimov`s aeronautics commission was authorised to build Vostok, a spacecraft designed to send - and return - a cosmonaut into space.
The resulting space race became symbolic of the technological status of the two superpowers. Karimov recalled that the Americans had difficulty believing the Soviet Union had really launched Sputnik. Then the western media coverage turned a minimal recognition of the Soviet achievement into huge interest.
Karimov described the loss he felt when Korolyov died in January 1966, three years before the Soviet Union succeeded in docking manned spacecraft. He said he had relied on Korolyov as the leading scientist and designer.
When the first tragedy occurred in 1967, with the death of Vladimir Komarov in Soyuz I, many people believed that if Korolyov had still been alive, the accident would never have occurred. The main parachute which was supposed to open at seven kilometres before landing got tangled and wouldn`t open. Karimov said there was a feeling, for a time, that the members of the aeronautics commission were personally accountable for his death. The constructor of the parachute lost his job, but since President Leonid Brezhnev understood the risky nature of these projects, in Karimov`s view, he didn`t fire either him or the minister.
The commission`s work was deeply influenced by the tragedy, as it was later in 1971 when cosmonauts Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patseyev were found dead when the hatch of Soyuz II was opened. A respiratory valve opened too early causing the life-sustaining air inside the ship to escape. The men, operating in cramped quarters, had not been wearing space suits and had no protection when the air leaked out.
Karimov`s name was a secret because he had previously worked on nuclear missiles before transferring to manned space flight. He was first mentioned in Pravda, in August 1987, during Mikhail Gorbachev`s era of glasnost and perestroika.
Karimov has died aged 85, oversaw the development of the Soviet manned space programme. Yet even though he attended the launches of all the major manned space missions from Yuri Gagarin`s first flight in Vostok 1 to the Mir space station in 1986, television cameras focused on the cosmonauts and not the person to whom they reported; only his voice was broadcast.
His anonymity remained until 1987. Photographs of his meetings with the cosmonauts were kept secret until he retired in 1990. They appeared in his first book - The Way To Space: The Notes Of The Chairman Of The State Commission.
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