The rewards were typical mid/early Soviet honors for excellence: Dachas (vacation homes), automobiles, special shopping and travel privileges, as well as standard honors like medals, pins and small cash awards.

Asif Siddiqi's The Red Rockets' Glare, published in February this year by Cambridge University Press has this to say after the Soviet launch of Sputnik:

On October 10, at a Politburo meeting, Riabikov, Korolev, Nedelin, and others reported to Khrushchev on the results of the launch. Discussion focused on both the international response as well as tasking Riabikov with assigning appropriate honors and prizes for the participants, including new dachas for the most senior designers. By a secret decree, about 500 designers, engineers and workers involved in the development of the R-7 ICBM and Sputnik were handed out awards in late December, a few of them with the nation's highest civilian honor, the Hero of Socialist Labor.

At this time, the dachas were given to all six members of the Council of Chief Designers: Korolev, Glushko, Piliugin, Riazanskii, Barmin and Kuznetsov. The edict for them was issued Dec. 18, 1957.

On a state level, the Soviet Union turned its lead rocket designers into scientific heroes. I'm thinking in particular of Korolev, who led the Soviet rocket design program until his death in 1966.

After his death, Pravda ran a two-page obituary and Korolev was given a state funeral in which his ashes were carried through Red Square to be interred in the Kremlin wall. Until that point, the Soviet public was not generally aware of who was designing the rockets that had the world gaga.

Upon Gagarin's death two years later in a plane crash, he was given similar treatment, albeit even more grandiose.