Abstract: History marks the events that can be truly called the scientific and technological breakthroughs. One of such achievements is the flight of the first man into space in 1961. However, the flight of the austranot in the spacecraft is just a small part of this event. Behind it are those who developed the spacecraft, launch vehicle, braking system, life support system, lodgment, spacesuit and many other systems. This reviews and systematizes the sources of personal origin, such as diaries, memoirs and correspondence of the scholars, who were the pioneers of the Soviet cosmonautics, as well as works on the history of space exploration. The object of this research is the circle of scholars and engineers, members of the Council of Chief Designers of 1946–1967. The article relies on the materials from the library of the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, Russian State Historical Library, as well as the collections of the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, collection of the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, and archive of the Academician S. P. Korolev Memorial House Museum. The analysis employs the sources of personal origin, such as correspondence, diaries and memoirs of the designers, which contain mentioning of their work, as well as give assessment of the activity and personality of their colleagues.

Abstract: The article studies the interactions of the Chief Designers’ Council members by the network analysis method based on the prosopographic database covering the creators of Soviet cosmonautics. Personal contacts of cosmonautics creators were undoubtedly very important in the activities of senior managers of such a complex scientific and engineering industry as the Soviet cosmonautics was. These are professional relations of the Chief Designers’ Council members the article addresses. The source base of the research is the materials library of the Russian State Archive of scientific and technical documentation, the Russian State Public History Library, the Russian State Archive of scientific and technical documentation, the funds of the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics and the archive of the Memorial House Museum of academician Sergey Korolev. The research novelty is the goal set to study professional communications of the Soviet space program creators on the basis of network analysis as well as the first attempt to collect and process a large array of texts of biographical and memoir sources (5500 abridged pages) associated with the Chief Designers’ Council using a set of quantitative methods. The main results of this study are networks of interactions that show who of the members of the 1946-1967 Chief Designers’ Council had a significant impact on the development of the Soviet cosmonautics and how communication links were distributed between them.

Abstract: The article studies the formation of the “Council of Chief Designers” cooperation that was a collective body and an unofficial coordination center determining technical and methodical course the Soviet space branch followed (Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, Vladimir Pavlovich Barmin, Valentin Petrovich Glushko, Nikolai Alekseevich Pilyugin, Mikhail Sergeevich Ryazanskiy and Viktor Ivanovich Kuznetsov as well as Boris Evseevich Chertok and Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh). The author analyzes their relations and reveals the role of communication for this process on the basis of private sources (letters, diaries and recollections) by means of content-analysis and statistical analysis. The period understudy is the years before 1966 when the Council was in its first “Korolev” composition. In spite of the fact that Soviet and Russian cosmonautics can boast a period of over 60-year development, top secrecy has resulted only in official biographies of the Council members. Works studying them as people, individuals with their own traits, fate and relations have not been written yet.