In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, the artillery plant was reconstructed for production of rockets, launch vehicles, and spacecraft, under the guidance of Soviet scientist and academician Sergei Korolev, who envisioned, consolidated and guided the activities of many people in the Soviet space-exploration program.

The plant later became known as the RKK Energia; when the Vostok space vehicle was being developed, this research center was designated as NII-88 or POB 989.

From the late 19 century, Podlipki was also known as a dacha village frequented by many literali, as can be witnessed by the name of Podlipki-Dachnye railway station.

[citation needed] They later moved their dachas to Peredelkino in Moscow's southwestern suburb, when Podlipki became a closed city of the Russian SFSR.

Over the next three decades the town expanded greatly as a home of rocket manufacturing for both military missiles and the Soviet space program.

On 14 September 2014, the candidate from the United Russia party, Alexander Khodyrev, was elected head of Korolyov.

But in the Soviet-era economy, the city typified the wide contrasts and ironic juxtapositions that arose as some aspects of life were heavily funded by the government while others remained chronically underfunded.

Yuri Krotkov described in his 1967 memoir[10] how, at the same time that advanced technology was being built for space rockets, the textile plants of old Podlipki went on for decades with nearly no improvement on their 1920s equipment, and starkly impoverished workers in various hard and glamourless jobs of prerevolutionary days crossed paths, sometimes resentfully, with the skilled technicians and scientists, who were substantially better paid despite the slogans of Soviet ideology around the equal dignity of manual labourers.

Many famous people, such as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Anton Chekhov, Valery Bryusov, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Levitan, Pavel Tretyakov, Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Lenin, lived here.