by Amy Cherrix
Korolev’s successful multi-crew-member Voskhod program had given the Russians two more impressive victories. The Soviet Union had beaten America in this round of the space race. But with each two-person Gemini flight, the US was closing the gap.
Project Gemini was designed to help NASA master the skills necessary to reach the moon. Between March 1965 and November 1966, ten Gemini crews flew twelve successful flights. Gemini 4 achieved America’s first space walk. For twenty-three minutes, Edward H. White II was tethered outside the Gemini capsule, staring into space through his helmet’s gold-plated visor, which protected his eyes from the sun’s dangerous rays. White said he was brokenhearted when he was ordered to end the space walk, calling it the “saddest moment of my life.” On the Gemini 5 flight, Gordon Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. were the first American astronauts to remain in orbit for more than a week. Gemini 8, with John Glenn and David Scott aboard, succeeded in connecting with another spacecraft. When Project Gemini concluded on November 15, 1966, in less than two years, America had achieved all of Project Gemini’s mission objectives and taken the lead in the space race.
Gemini spacecraft.
Korolev refused to accept the success of Project Gemini as a defeat. In December 1965, his stubborn campaign to restore funding to the N-1 program was finally successful. He planned to land on the moon by 1968. Given the advanced stages of the Apollo program, succeeding with the N-1 was an enormous challenge.
In Huntsville, von Braun was not without his own worries. The five temperamental F-1 engines needed to boost the Apollo capsule and the Saturn V rocket into space had to pass one more test.
Marshall Space Flight Center
APRIL 16, 1965
HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA
“Attention, all personnel! Attention, all personnel! Clear the test stand area,” a voice boomed through the loudspeaker. All systems were “go” for the first static test firing of all five F-1 engines, which made up the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. The test was two months ahead of its original schedule. The challenge had been creating and then containing the explosive alchemy between liquid oxygen and kerosene when the fuel poured into the engine bell at a rate fast enough to fill a family-size swimming pool every ten seconds. The ambitious von Braun knew that a failure at this stage could be a devastating setback. Combustion instability was unpredictable and a persistent concern. But whether it was balancing potentially explosive elements in a rocket engine or balancing his troubling past with his hopes for the future, von Braun never lost his footing. Since his arrival in the US, his life had been an exercise in containing the potentially explosive truth in his pursuit of spaceflight. For two decades, his connection to Mittelwerk had remained hidden.
Years of planning, exhaustive testing, failures, and redesigns had brought von Braun and the temperamental F-1 engine to another defining moment.
The countdown began. “Five, four, three, two, one . . . Ignition!”
With that command, flames boiled from the base of the five F-1 engines in a deafening roar. Windows around Huntsville rattled. The ground rumbled, but there was no sign of combustion instability. Each of the five bell-shaped F-1 engines weighed over nine tons, generated 1.5 million pounds of thrust, and had a potential energy output equal to the power of eighty-five Hoover Dams, more than enough to push Apollo to the moon and reassure Wernher von Braun that the engine, like his troubling past, could be contained.
THE F-1
According to NASA, the F-1 engine is most powerful American liquid-fuel rocket engine ever produced.
The enthusiasm surrounding the space race in the US and the USSR concealed a darker reality lurking beneath the high-tech competition. In the years to come, the price paid by some of those working on American and Soviet moon shots would not be calculated on a government budget sheet. The breakneck pace of innovation drove many to early graves. The unseen cost was exacted in long work hours, the unhealthy lifestyle (little sleep, poor eating habits, and lots of cigarette smoking), and broken marriages. The near-constant emotional stress that came with their high-stakes jobs was extraordinary. It wasn’t just astronauts and cosmonauts who put it all on the line. Countless people, in the United States and the USSR, whose names were never known, toiled in machine shops, factories, and laboratories, while their families wondered when they would see their loved one at the dinner table again. Political pressure and the all-consuming obsession with winning the space race compelled many to accomplish the near impossible at any price.
For Korolev the cost was deteriorating health. By December 1965, he had been sick for some time, and tired easily. But the bullish chief designer concealed his symptoms from his closest colleagues and friends. His secretary, Antonina Zlotnikova, never suspected her boss was sick and recalled him saying, “I will die right here, at this desk.” Korolev’s strong-looking physique helped hide the truth, but his heart had been compromised by years of suffering in prison. He wrote to his second wife, Nina, from Baikonur, saying, “I am somehow unusually deeply tired . . . sometimes the little heart aches a bit.” When medical tests revealed a bleeding polyp in Korolev’s intestine, doctors scheduled surgery for January. The large rocket enterprise could function without him during his recovery, but Korolev’s team knew that if the Soviets were going to beat the Americans, it would take every ounce of Korolev’s strength and intellect. Sheer force of will was no longer enough to keep his rocket program alive.
Vietnam
As Korolev confronted the reality of his declining health, the Soviet Union and America sank deeper into the Cold War. A controversial jungle conflict in the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam was coming to a head. As with the Korean War in the early 1950s, the two countries took sides against each other in the fight. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and South Vietnam by the United States. A small number of American military advisers had been present in Vietnam during the 1950s. Beginning in 1961, those numbers increased. By 1965 combat troops had arrived. As the war escalated, young American men were drafted into mandatory military service and sent to fight in Vietnam. For the first time, a war was televised in the United States. Nowadays, life without television and streaming devices seems incomprehensible. In the 1960s, however, television was at-home technology that didn’t fit in your pocket. Twenty-four-hour cable news stations did not exist, and the nightly news broadcasts lasted for only fifteen to thirty minutes per day. Televisions became more commonplace in American households. For the first time, families could tune in to the evening news and watch film footage as journalists reported from the war zone. Blood that was shed half a world away seeped into American living rooms. Safe from bullets and bombs, Americans witnessed the carnage, death, and misery of battle. Eventually, these gruesome scenes, along with a high number of casualties, outraged many Americans, who believed the war was pointless and impossible to win.
On April 17, 1965, one day after the successful test of the F-1 engines, between 15,000 and 25,000 peaceful protesters descended on Washington, DC, to march against the war in Vietnam. Up to that point, it was the largest peace protest in US history. Americans were asking tough questions of President Lyndon Johnson. Why was the Vietnam War necessary? When would it end? Why was the United States spending billions on a moon shot when teenagers as young as eighteen years of age were being sent to to die in a war that seemed to worsen with each passing day?
Civil rights leaders added their voices to the protest. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., criticized Apollo spending. He wanted the government to reallocate the money to solve social problems for the people suffering on planet Earth. Abernathy argued the money should be used to make people’s lives better by building houses for the homeless and feeding the hungry.
The space race had revealed a division in American priorities. Should scientific discovery truly take precedence when soldiers were dying in Vietnam and poverty-stricken Americans were going hungry at home? Why would a nation invest vast sums
of money in a space race that, in the minds of many, had no practical application in making life better on Earth? Did the race to the moon matter more than a human life?
Perhaps Korolev would have agreed that reaching the moon was worth any sacrifice. He had compromised his health, relinquished his peace of mind, and been forced to work in complete anonymity. Through it all, the chief designer never doubted how much he would give to the endeavor. And maybe one day, if he lived long enough, he would at last hear the voices of his Russian comrades proudly chanting his name in Red Square.
Chapter 36
Da Svidaniya (“Goodbye”)
While Americans debated the wisdom of funding the moon landing, work on the N-1 rocket proceeded in the Soviet Union. On January 4, 1966, Vasily Mishin, Korolev’s deputy of twenty years, held a meeting with key managers of the N-1 moon-landing team. The group didn’t expect Korolev to attend because he was scheduled for surgery the next day. When Boris Chertok looked up from the meeting to see Korolev at the door, he noticed that the chief designer wasn’t himself. “He was wearing his coat and fur hat . . . and looked at us with a tender and wistful smile.” Chertok recalled that he seemed “run-down, melancholy, and lost in his thoughts.” The chief designer nodded to the group and said, “Well, carry on!” The engineers said goodbye, and without entering the room, Korolev walked away.
On January 5, 1966, he was readmitted to the hospital for polyp surgery. The doctors reassured Korolev that there was no real cause for concern, explaining that it was “less complicated than an appendectomy.” He was expected to return to work in one week, but that did little to improve the chief designer’s foul mood. He didn’t like to sit still when there was so much work to do. Now he was stuck in a hospital bed. He was miserable and aggravated by everything, from his misplaced slippers to his poor hearing. (For a relatively young man, not yet sixty years old, Korolev suffered premature hearing loss, possibly caused by the roar of engines at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.) He had a hearing aid, but the hardheaded chief designer refused to use it. As his anxiety peaked, he said to Nina, “I can’t work like this any longer.”
Korolev left Mishin in charge while he was hospitalized. Although Mishin lacked Korolev’s political finesse and influence, he had agreed to serve in the role until Korolev could resume his duties. He trusted that the rugged chief designer would recover, as he always did from these attacks of poor health.
Soon after Korolev’s departure, Mishin’s authority was challenged when he was severely reprimanded by a senior official. The exact reason is unknown, but the encounter rattled an already overwhelmed Mishin. The stress of the job was too much to bear, and Mishin wanted to quit. Another engineer who worked with Korolev, and knew Mishin was preparing to resign, contacted Korolev in the hospital.
The chief designer knew he could not run his sprawling rocket program from a hospital bed. If there was any hope of continuing against the Americans, Korolev had to convince Mishin to stay until he returned.
Korolev picked up the phone.
“What are you doing?” Korolev asked Mishin, who replied that he was writing a letter of resignation.
“It is hard enough to work with you, but with him,” Mishin said, referring to the senior official who had admonished him, “there is no way.” Korolev held firm and told Mishin to tear up the letter. “Ministers come and ministers go, but we stay in our own business.” A few well-chosen words from his longtime leader had convinced Mishin to stay.
Korolev went into surgery at eight a.m., on Friday, January 14, 1966. It was supposed to be a relatively short procedure, but as Korolev’s daughter, Natalia, later described it, the operation did not go according to plan. “My father hemorrhaged on the operating table.” The surgeon “cut the abdomen to stop the bleeding, and found a cancerous tumor, which had not been visible before.” According to a nurse present in the operating room, the tumor was the size of two fists. For eight hours, Korolev was under anesthesia. He survived the operation, but his prognosis was grim. The surgeon closed him up with the knowledge that once he regained consciousness, the chief designer only had a few months left to live. His team at the OKB-1 workshop would be devastated to learn that the chief designer was dying. He had hidden his declining health for years. Korolev’s team couldn’t have known that his condition was life-threatening, or that he might not live long enough to see his N-1 rocket launched to the moon.
But Korolev wouldn’t be granted those last few months of life. Thirty minutes after surgery, he stopped breathing. Doctors raced back to Korolev’s room, but it was too late. His battered heart, damaged from years of abuse in the Gulag, could not sustain him.
At age fifty-nine, Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Union’s hidden hero of the space race, was dead.
On January 16, Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, announced publicly, for the first time, the long-held secret identity of chief designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. Leonid Brezhnev, who had replaced Nikita Khrushchev as the new Soviet premier in 1964, decided that the chief designer’s name could finally be revealed. His obituary was published along with his photograph. The once-invisible man materialized before the world.
His longtime associate and fellow engineer Boris Chertok was given just one hour to draft the obituary and put Korolev’s legacy into words. When Chertok submitted his draft to Ivan Dmitriyevich Serbin, head of the Central Committee’s Department of the Defense Industry, for approval, Serbin said, “It can’t be this modest.” Chertok took the opportunity to insert another line, one that he felt encapsulated Korolev’s strength of character in overcoming repression under Stalin’s rule. He wrote: “Korolev remained an ardent patriot and steadfastly pursed his goal—to fulfill the dream of spaceflight, despite years of unjust persecution.”
Chertok had taken care in choosing those words, but he had gone too far by hinting that Korolev had been victimized by Stalin’s purges. “I was attempting to inform the reader that [Korolev] had suffered repression,” Chertok wrote in his memoir. He wanted to reflect Korolev’s tenacious spirit; that the chief designer had survived and thrived for a time in spite of all that he’d suffered. Korolev had endured the Great Terror and a six-year-long prison nightmare as an innocent man, but there would be no public mention of the catastrophic role Stalin had played in Korolev’s life. Chertok watched as “Serbin frowned, and without saying a word, firmly crossed out those lines.” Stalin’s reign of terror still loomed over those who remembered.
Brezhnev announced plans for a full state funeral in Red Square. The Russian people would have the opportunity to pay their respects at a public viewing at noon the next day in the House of Unions. By nine a.m., a line had already formed in the bitter cold, with the first person waiting three hours to enter.
Thousands more Soviet citizens descended on the capital to pay their respects to their comrade. Boris Chertok understood why. “A particle of truth had finally been revealed to them,” he wrote. “There was a general sense of being party to a partially divulged secret.” Finally, the Russian people could see who had brought such glory to the homeland by snatching repeated victories away from the Americans. “There was a shared grief and a shared pride. It was late in coming, but the people had been given the opportunity to pay tribute to the great Korolev. . . . It was as if everyone who passed by his casket brushed up against these historic achievements.” Cosmonauts, and many of the Soviet space program’s other chief designers and deputies, served as an honor guard at Korolev’s casket. They stood in shifts, trading places with one another in a final show of respect and devotion. “We wanted to be with Korolev a little longer, even though he was no longer with us,” Chertok wrote.
Korolev was cremated, and the following day his ashes were interred in the wall of the Kremlin alongside those of past Soviet leaders and heroes. It was a historic public honor for a man who had once been branded a traitor but had risen above every inconceivable obstacle to lead his country in the space race. Now it would fall to his trusted deputy, Vasily Mishin, to carry on w
hat Korolev had started, as the new leader of Korolev’s rocket team.
Russians pay their final respects at Sergei Korolev’s funeral.
In America, von Braun finally learned the identity of his brilliant rival. Sergei Korolev was the worthy adversary who had driven him—and the world—into the space race. He knew Korolev’s death was a crushing blow to the Russians. Would they ever make it to the moon without him?
Chapter 37
“A Rough Road Leads to the Stars”
While the Soviets reeled from Korolev’s death, the American space program had its own setbacks with three years remaining in President Kennedy’s countdown. The Saturn V rocket still wasn’t ready, so it was decided that upcoming Apollo test flight missions would launch with the Saturn I rocket, an earlier model. The tests were designed to confirm procedures to save lives by anticipating problems, but there were no guarantees. Astronaut Gus Grissom, who had once been asked about the possibility of dying in the quest for the moon, said, “If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
On January 27, 1967, an Apollo 1 capsule sat on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. Sealed inside the command module that day were astronauts Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, and Edward “Ed” White. The team was conducting a detailed simulation during which the rocket would remain on the pad and not actually launch. During the exercise, the spacecraft disengaged from all its cables and tethers to prove its internal power system was functioning. If all went according to plan during this “plugs out” test, the first actual launch of an Apollo flight would happen one month later.
