After a long series of failed moon launches, Sergei Korolev is called back to Moscow to report. His protector, Khrushchev, has been discharged, and now Brezhnev is in charge. He will never make it to Moscow. He is admitted to the hospital on January 13, 1966, for the removal of a colon tumor. He requests, and obtains, that the Minister of Health, Dr. Boris Petrovsky, himself operate on him. During the operation, another, more serious tumor is discovered, the size of a fist. The operation continues, a blood vessel ruptures, a hemorrhage begins, and Korolev’s heart, already weakened in the labor camps, fails. They cannot ventilate him because of the jaw fractured in the Gulag. On January 14, he is declared dead. The Soviet Space Program will never be the same again. It will have other designers, planners, politicians, administrators, and visionaries, but never all of these things in one person. His successor will be Vasili Mishin, his former right-hand man.
