Sergei Korolev, born in Zhytomyr (Ukraine), is the hidden chief designer of the Soviet space program. His technical trajectory starts from GIRD's liquid-fuel rockets (Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, ~1931-1932), where the GIRD-09 was launched in August 1933, the first Soviet liquid-fuel rocket. After the Gulag (1938-1944), Korolev led the reverse engineering of the captured German V-2, producing the R-1 (~1948) and the double-range R-2 (~1950-1951, dates to verify). The R-7 (1957), the world's first ICBM, was the launcher for Sputnik 1 (4 October 1957, the first artificial satellite) and for Yuri Gagarin's flight (Vostok 1, 12 April 1961). His identity was kept secret by the Soviet government throughout his life — he was known only as "the Chief Designer" — to protect him from possible attacks and because Stalin did not want any individual to receive credit for the space success. The Western world did not know who had designed the program until his official obituary in January 1966.