 Sergei Korolev was a vitally important member of GIRD, and later became the head of the Soviet space program.Korolev would play a crucial role in both the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the mission which put Yuri Gagarin in space in 1961.In the early stages of Soviet rocketry science, Korolev, who initiated the program in Moscow, called the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, abbreviated as GIRD in Russian.