In the Shadow of the Moon

by Amy Cherrix

With his invention of the ICBM, Korolev forever changed modern warfare by making the world a much smaller place. This dark by-product of his scientific legacy is a global threat, particularly from countries like North Korea, where the isolated communist dictatorship is working to become a nuclear power. It routinely tests ballistic and intercontinental ballistic missiles in an attempt to threaten and intimidate other nations, like its neighbor, South Korea, and the United States.

  Korolev’s R-7 was composed of two sections, or stages. The first stage had four liquid fuel engines that supplied the massive thrust required to boost the vehicle off the ground at launch. When the first stage’s fuel supply was spent, the engines fell away. All that remained was the second stage, now lighter and able to fly farther because the first stage had been detached.

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  R-7 rocket (Semyorka).

  Subject: R-7 missile

  Nickname: “Semyorka” (Seven)

  Description: Two-stage rocket and the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

  Range: 5,000 miles

  Length: 102 feet

  Weight: 280 tons

  First successful test launch: August 21, 1957

  Payload capacity: up to five-ton nuclear warhead

  Just as von Braun had bigger plans for his Redstone rocket, Korolev wanted more for his R-7. He knew that in order for an object to break free of Earth’s gravity, it needed to travel at a velocity close to four miles per second, roughly the speed required for his R-7 to fly halfway around the world. To achieve such velocity, the rocket needed powerful engines. To build them, Korolev called on the Soviet Union’s greatest rocket engine designer: Valentin Petrovich Glushko.

  Yes, that Valentin Glushko. The same man Korolev had been thrown into the Gulag for defending against NKVD accusations. Glushko, like Korolev, had shown early promise as a bright boy with a vivid imagination. He was born in Ukraine in 1908. By the age of twelve, he, too, read Jules Verne novels and dreamed of space travel. Glushko studied math and physics at Leningrad State University. By 1930, he was working on electric rocket engine research.

  Russian rocket engine designer Valentin Petrovich Glushko.

  Swept up in Stalin’s purges, Glushko had been arrested in 1938 but was not sentenced to a labor camp like Kolyma. He had been more fortunate than Korolev. Glushko served his entire sentence in one of the sharashka prisons for technically skilled workers. He was among the group of engineers, including Korolev, who were suddenly released from prison near the end of World War II. He, too, was dispatched to Soviet-occupied Germany, where he aided in the study and recovery of German rocket technology, specializing in engines.

  Reliable accounts confirm that Korolev and Glushko had an amicable working relationship, despite their complicated history and imprisonment. They even exchanged Christmas cards. Although there was constant bickering over small details, a “general atmosphere of truly creative enthusiasm prevailed,” one engineer recalled. Inside the emerging Soviet space program, however, loyalty would become an increasingly rare commodity as ambition and bitter rivalry fueled the obsessive quest for spaceships.

  Chapter 13

  A Rocket Man in Tomorrowland

  1954

  While Korolev and Glushko worked together to design an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a weapon of mass destruction to the United States, Walt Disney was trying to build the happiest place on Earth in Anaheim, California. The massive theme park would revolve around his animated characters and films. But the beloved Mickey Mouse creator needed money to finance the project. So he struck a deal with the ABC television network. In exchange for the network’s funding Disneyland’s construction, Walt Disney would produce Disneyland, a weekly televison program with segments correlating to the park’s four areas: Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. Disney had ideas for the first three programs, but “Tomorrowland” proved difficult to conceptualize.

  One of Walt Disney’s animators, Ward Kimball, told him how impressed he had been with von Braun’s articles in Collier’s. The two men agreed that Wernher von Braun was the perfect person to educate the country about the future of space travel in the “Tomorrowland” program for ABC. It was the chance von Braun had been waiting for. The Disney program provided an ideal platform to rally support for spaceflight. Collier’s had made von Braun increasingly popular. He had become so famous, in fact, that he hired a Hollywood talent agent to manage his new role as America’s favorite spaceflight celebrity. When von Braun accepted Disney’s offer, his talent agent brokered the deal.

  Walt Disney and von Braun, 1954.

  On March 9, 1955, Walt Disney made Wernher von Braun a household name before a record-setting viewing audience of forty million Americans. The articulate engineer explained in clear and accessible terms how a rocket ship crewed by highly trained astronauts could leave Earth and explore outer space. His expertise and convincing delivery provided an escape for Americans who feared communists lurking at the borders and nuclear bombs falling from the sky. Von Braun and Walt Disney gave people what they wanted most: hope for a better tomorrow. In the process, the rocket man became a star.

  Those watching von Braun on television or reading about him in newspapers and magazines had no knowledge of his connection to Mittelwerk, or that he had been an officer in Hitler’s SS. His membership in the Nazi Party was not a secret, but von Braun was gifted at obscuring the questionable aspects of his past, reassuring Americans that he’d only ever been devoted to his rockets. He had never been an extremist, like Himmler, who, von Braun reminded them, had once arrested him. As for membership in the party, it had been nothing more than a distasteful administrative formality required in the pursuit of his life’s work. Although von Braun had worked for Hitler, he had chosen to use his considerable technical skill to benefit the people of the United States. Many Americans no longer saw the inventor of the deadly V-2 when they looked at von Braun. Here was a smart, media-savvy genius, with an easy smile and a way with words, who appeared on television literally promising them the moon. There was no incentive to pry into von Braun’s past when the technological future he promised was so thrilling.

  Von Braun took the oath of American citizenship one month later in the Huntsville High School auditorium with his wife, Maria, and thirty-eight of the German rocket experts and their families. Von Braun called it “one of the proudest and most significant days of my life.”

  Von Braun’s Petition for Naturalization bears his signature and paved the way for him to become a US citizen.

  Cloudy with a Chance of Spy Satellites

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower had no idea what the Soviets were up to, but he feared the worst. “Since the advent of nuclear weapons, it seems clear that there is no longer any alternative to peace, if there is to be a happy and well world,” he said. The decorated veteran had served as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II. Now he was leading his country through the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower believed military reconnaissance—spying—was the best way to protect America from the Soviet Union. After Russian nuclear physicists successfully tested the country’s first thermonuclear bomb in August 1953—a 400-kiloton weapon (the Nagasaki bomb was 20 kilotons)—he worried about a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. Eisenhower remembered the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Kamikaze suicide pilots attacked, killing 2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians on December 7, 1941, drawing America into World War II.

  The president feared a future Pearl Harbor–style nuclear confrontation. In early 1954, he approved illegal airplane surveillance of the Soviet Union. The low-altitude flights were dangerous, and pilots could be shot down by the Soviets if they were spotted. The Cold War was a new conflict that demanded new strategies. Eisenhower needed a better way to spy on the USSR from higher altitudes. For advice, he turned to another president.
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  Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP)

  That same year, James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and chair of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, convened a group of experts to brainstorm national surveillance strategies for Eisenhower. Killian’s panel recommended the use of small scientific satellites. American intelligence officials had known about the potential to launch satellites with rockets as early as 1946, when a report commissioned by the US military (Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship) stated that a satellite could theoretically be launched into orbit by a rocket. The report called the satellite “one of the most potent scientific tools of the 20th century” and noted that it was “comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb.”

  Rather than pilots taking intermittent photographs, the satellite proposed by the panel allowed for continuous and long-term monitoring of the enemy and eliminated the need to risk pilots’ lives in airplane surveillance. The panel further advised that Eisenhower begin developing America’s first spy satellites. Eisenhower agreed. The project was classified, and not even von Braun, the country’s top rocket designer, knew about it.

  Before Eisenhower could develop and deploy satellites, he had to overcome a legal obstacle. There were no established laws governing space. Did a country’s borders extend vertically into the atmosphere, and if so, how far? If the United States launched a satellite and flew it over an enemy country—the Soviet Union, for example—did that constitute an act of war? Eisenhower needed a way to force the issue of freedom of space without threatening other countries.

  The International Council of Scientific Unions coincidentally provided Eisenhower’s solution. The organization was preparing to unite the world through science: July 1957 through December 1958 was designated as the International Geophysical Year. Countries were invited to collect and share scientific data about the Earth and launch scientific satellites. The IGY’s humanitarian mission provided a nonthreatening (and convenient) reason to launch world-circling satellites and thereby establish the freedom-of-space principle without confrontation. On March 14, 1955, the US announced its plan to launch a satellite as part of the yearlong scientific project. Not to be outdone, two months later the Soviets announced that they would launch a satellite as well.

  By that summer, Korolev’s expanding rocket program was gaining momentum. His proposal for the R-7 rocket was approved. But the old Kapustin Yar test range could not accommodate the huge intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead or a future Soviet satellite. On June 7, the Soviets broke ground on a new launch facility in the desert of Kazakhstan, 1,300 miles from Moscow. When it was finished, it would be the world’s first spaceport: the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the site of some of the most historic rocket launches of the twentieth century. As the US and USSR began preparations for the IGY, the stage was set for the first battle of the space race.

  The quest for satellites had begun.

  Stage II

  The Quest for Satellites

  Chapter 14

  A Red Moon Rises

  FEBRUARY 20, 1956, OUTSIDE MOSCOW

  KOROLEV’S ROCKET WORKSHOP, OKB-1

  The secret hangar “stretched upward like a many-meters-tall glass tower-aquarium . . . the windows covered by a thick layer of white paint—protection from curious eyes,” recalled Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Sergei, an engineer, had joined his father and a group of Soviet officials on a tour of Korolev’s rocket workshop, known as OKB-1. The well-lit room had to be large to accommodate the massive rocket before them. “Crowding together at the entrance, we all stared silently at this miracle of technology.” The visitors inspected the rocket from every angle. The Soviet leader was humbled by Korolev’s creation, saying, “We did everything but lick it to see how it tasted.” His official visit was a sign of Korolev’s increasing influence and, Korolev hoped, an indication that Khruschev would authorize the R-7 to launch a satellite.

  Korolev explained that a missile needed a range of approximately 5,000 miles to reach US targets, and he was confident such a range was eventually possible for the R-7 rocket. A vehicle this powerful rendered contemporary air defense systems useless because it soared high, fast, and well out of enemy target range. Calculations had shown that five nuclear weapons would be enough to destroy England; a few more would lay waste to France.

  “Yes, a terrible force,” said Khrushchev. “The last war was bloody, but with such warheads, it has become simply unthinkable; five warheads and a whole country gone. Terrible.”

  “I would like you to know about still another project,” said Korolev. Sensing the momentum he had gained, he led the group to a nearby stand that supported a metallic sphere model with rods protruding on all sides. His visitors were confused. Compared to what they had seen thus far, the metal orb was unremarkable.

  It was a satellite, Korolev explained. With Khrushchev’s support, he was certain his team could use the R-7 missile to launch the satellite into orbit around the Earth like an artificial moon. A similar satellite could one day be fitted with a camera, able to observe the planet from space, photographing anything the Soviet government might want to see—and things other world governments preferred to keep secret. The satellite project would not detract from ongoing defense work, and he pointed out that it carried immense propaganda value as well. The Americans were already working on a satellite, he cautioned. If the USSR could launch one before the US, it would be the first country on Earth to put a man-made object into space. The superiority of Soviet technology would be undeniable. Korolev assured Khrushchev that he could easily replace the R-7’s warhead with the satellite and launch it.

  Khrushchev listened attentively to the chief designer. He examined the satellite model closely; Korolev’s proposal was sound. Based on what Khrushchev had seen already, Korolev was a capable and visionary engineer. His team’s inventions were brilliant, and the workshop was equally impressive.

  “The main priority is security for the country,” Khrushchev reminded Korolev. But as long as the satellite did not interfere with other defense projects, why not attempt to beat the Americans to space?

  With Khrushchev’s final approval, Korolev’s design bureau was cleared to launch the Soviet Union’s first satellite.

  Chapter 15

  Army vs. Navy

  While Korolev was receiving approval to launch his Earth satellite in the USSR, von Braun’s Huntsville team, operating under the US Army, was in a heated competition with the US Navy for the privilege of launching America’s first satellite. These were the pre-NASA days, when every rocket and satellite project was a military operation and, therefore, highly classified. The only information available to the American public was that their country was attempting to launch a satellite in celebration of the International Geophysical Year.

  Von Braun desperately wanted his Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) team to be chosen for the assignment. This was what they had come to the United States to do, and a satellite was the next step in space exploration. The army detailed their plans to partner with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, for the IGY satellite launch. Von Braun’s group would provide a modified Redstone rocket called Jupiter-C (a beefed-up version of the V-2) as a launch vehicle. The multistage rocket had a detachable nose cone that could be easily adapted to accommodate a simple five-pound satellite for release into Earth’s orbit. To build the scientific satellite, the JPL team, headed by William Pickering, partnered with a University of Iowa geophysicist, James Van Allen.

  Van Allen hypothesized that a band of radiation encircled the Earth. Along with a team of graduate students working in the basement of the University of Iowa’s physics building, he developed a cosmic ray detector to be carried on board the satellite to test for the existence of radiation bands. If Van Allen’s hypothesis was correct, that radiation could be a hazardous obstacle to future spaceflight pioneers.


  The competing project was designed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), a research institution within the US Navy, and led by John P. Hagen. Their proposal would use the navy’s multistage Vanguard rocket to launch a satellite that would gather data about the shape of the Earth and measure fluctuations in its gravitational field. Von Braun’s modified “Old Reliable” Redstone was ready to go, but the Vanguard rocket was still under development, its third stage not yet completed.

  From the beginning, von Braun was skeptical that the navy could have their rocket ready in time. He was confident in his team’s hardware and that their proposal would win the satellite project. When the navy’s proposal was chosen, von Braun’s team was shocked and angry. “We had worked hard in the short time we had to put it together,” engineer Randy Clinton recalled. Clinton was one of many Americans who worked with the Germans at the Redstone Arsenal. They were proud of the job they were doing and admired von Braun’s leadership. But the Germans wondered if it was politics, not pursuit of the best proposal, that had cost them the job. The Redstone rocket was based on the V-2 design, a missile with a lethal reputation. Because the decision had been made behind closed doors, it was impossible to know for sure.

  The truth was, however, that the navy had a superior scientific proposal and satellite, and their rocket was highly efficient—or would be once it was finished. The Vanguard may have been unproven, but it was also a 100 percent American design. Von Braun didn’t care how impressive the navy’s rocket and satellite looked on paper. He was certain it would fail.

  Von Braun worried that delays caused by the underdeveloped Vanguard rocket increased the chances of the Russians beating America to space. He resolved to be ready when the time came. He would not defy direct orders and launch the army satellite, but he wouldn’t follow those orders to the letter, either. If he had played by the rules at the end of the war, he might not have made it out of Germany alive. So von Braun and Dr. William Pickering of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory hatched a plan.