by Kurt Caswell
Heavily built and muscular, with dark brown eyes and an unstoppable intelligence, Korolev’s great talent was not so much design and engineering but project management, organization, leadership. He was a master collaborator, a man his team both respected and feared. He was fast to anger but lavishly generous. If Korolev told you to do something, you did it. In Challenge to Apollo, Asif Siddiqi reports that engineer Anatoliy Abramov wrote: “Korolev’s diatribes were the stuff of legend, and he was a master at it; his eyes would flash, his words would destroy yours, he would threaten to send you home walking between the railway tracks.” Despite such harshness, Korolev understood that in a system where people who worked hard earned little more than people who didn’t, his team would benefit if he offered incentives by way of bonus money and elaborate vacations. “A real king,” Anatoliy Kirillov calls him in Roads to Space, an oral history of the early days of the Soviet space program, “the undisputed boss of everything.” That role as undisputed boss made him sometimes difficult to work with, while his prison years had left him soberingly pragmatic, even prone to dark moods. He was fond of proclaiming, “We will all vanish without a trace.”
Like Laika in her capsule, Korolev was a kind of prisoner inside his work, as the Soviet government saw to it that he lived the life of a vanished man. His identity was known only to a select few in the government, to his family, and to the people he worked with. To most Soviets and to the outside world, he was known only as the chief designer. US intelligence did not know his name until a year before his death, and it was only after his death that the Soviets released his name to the world. Were his identity known, the Soviets feared, the US would assassinate him. So Korolev lived and worked his entire life in anonymity. Perhaps if he had been known to the world and lived in the light of his work, it would have helped him shrug off his great darkness. Perhaps not. But one thing the Soviets got right: genius is not rooted in the individual but in the community, not in the chief designer alone but in his team. It is a collaboration of great minds, each doing their part, nurtured and driven by competition. Korolev’s genius was in the way he orchestrated all the parts to make them work together. In his mind was a future he wanted to build, and he found the will and the people to help him build it. Among the great achievements of Korolev and his team is a string of world firsts: the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik I, 1957); the first biological satellite (Sputnik II, 1957); the first moon landing, uncrewed (Luna 2, 1959); the first human being in space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961); and the first spacewalk (Alexey Leonov, 1965).
Korolev’s genius is an extension of the work of earlier and contemporary scientists and engineers who informed and inspired him. First, take Russia’s Nikolai Kibalchich (1853–1881), who was hanged for building the explosives used to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Imprisoned and awaiting execution, Kibalchich wrote down what he called his grand idea, essentially that explosives could be used not only to kill a tsar but also to propel a flying machine through the atmosphere. Soviet science writer Yakov Perelman later described his grand idea as “the first step in the history of spaceflight.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a high school math and physics teacher, worked on designs for a spacecraft capable of taking men to distant planets, namely Mars. He predicted that satellites and crewed space stations would one day orbit the Earth, and that this might be achieved by use of a rocket burning liquid fuels. He is best known for the Tsiolkovsky equation, his calculation for the speed required for a spacecraft to achieve Earth orbit—five miles per second, or about 18,000mph—and that this speed could be achieved by a multistage rocket fueled by burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen. These same basic principles govern rocketry today. “There is no doubt, though,” writes Harford, “about the degree to which Tsiolkovsky’s works gave direction to Sergei Korolev. In simple fact, Korolev began to build what Tsiolkovsky had conceived.” Yet for Tsiolkovsky, what he had conceived was a mechanical means to a much greater achievement: happiness for all beings in the universe. In order to achieve happiness (what Tsiolkovsky defined as the absence of suffering), humans had to understand the workings of the universe, which was only possible by learning to live and work in space. It was inevitable, he believed, that human beings would one day live on other planets throughout our solar system and eventually spread across the galaxy. For Tsiolkovsky, our technology, our will and choice, our migration out among the stars, would one day drive our evolution, and we would then be able to remake ourselves into something new, something better.
From the US, Korolev was inspired by the work of Robert Goddard (1882–1945), who built and launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, apparently from the farm of his aunt Effie in his hometown of Auburn, Massachusetts. He later moved his work to Roswell, New Mexico. Among his achievements, Goddard launched 35 rockets, filed 214 patents, developed the first gyroscopic stabilization systems, steerable thrust, and parachute recovery systems, and wrote one of the still classic books on rocketry, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. Goddard kept a series of notes and musings locked away in a friend’s safe that describe what he calls “the ultimate migration,” a human voyage to distant worlds in ships propelled by atomic energy or a combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and solar energy. Another option Goddard toyed with was to hitch a ride on a comet, an idea later put forth by NASA as a viable option for deep-space travel. He also imagined that human beings might be able to withstand long space voyages by dropping into a cryogenic state.
And, finally, among this company is Werner von Braun from Germany (1912–1977), who came to the United States after designing and building the V-2 missile for Hitler during World War II. After the war von Braun went to work for the US Army and later for NASA, turning his great talent and ambition away from missiles for military application and toward exploration of the cosmos. He was the chief architect of the Apollo program’s Saturn V rocket, which took human beings to the moon. Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, von Braun argued passionately for sending human beings to Mars.
In an interview with Sergei Khrushchev, I asked about Korolev, a man he had met socially through his father. “Korolev was a tank,” Khrushchev told me. “A brilliant manager, not really a scientist, but he was the person who could push everything through. And he could organize everything around him and keep control, like a general. He was not a general like Eisenhower, maybe more like MacArthur. Or maybe better to say General Patton. He was a very good man. It would have been very difficult to bring these projects to success without his ability to organize all these people.”
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In 1949 Korolev selected a young physician named Vladimir Yazdovsky (1913–1999) to lead a team in biomedical research to prepare the way for sending a human being into space. Yazdovsky was charged not only with designing and building life-support systems for space travel but also with developing a selection and training program for small animals that would test those systems. After working as a physician for the army during World War II, Yazdovsky had hoped to retire from the military, but when his request was denied he continued his service with the air force, working on aviation medicine. When Korolev approached Yazdovsky with an offer to work on a new project, he was initially uninterested. “I informed [Korolev] that … I was already committed to other work in aviation medicine,” Yazdovsky said in Roads to Space. Korolev, naturally, pushed back. “What I am offering you is far more challenging,” he said. Then he asked, “Have you ever watched a rocket being launched?” Yazdovsky responded that he had not. “Well, then,” Korolev said, “if you’ve seen it once, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
As a guest of Lockheed Martin and United Launch Alliance, I watched an ISS resupply mission launch on an Atlas V rocket out of Cape Canaveral in spring 2016. The day before the launch, I joined a party of other guests—mostly family and friends of the teams that built the rocket—to watch the rocket rollout to the pad. It moved slowly along a track, like the Empire State Building on wheels. The n
ext evening, after hors d’oeuvres, we assembled on the roof of a building some four miles from the launchpad, which was the closest we could get without being part of the team launching the rocket, a United Launch Alliance representative told me. A few clouds drifted in moonlight over the Atlantic, but it was otherwise a clear and starry night. I stood near a couple of people I had met there, the man who directed the team that designed and built the rocket’s wiring harness, and an executive with a top NASA contractor. People drew in their breath when the engines fired, and the rocket came up into the space above the pad and seemed to hover there. When the rocket rose against the night sky, the bright flare from the engines roared, and then it crackled, like violently crumpling brown paper. That sound filled everything that could hold a sound and then spilled over. I could feel it in my feet and in my chest. I felt something of myself going up with that rocket too, that in my brief time in its company I had become somehow invested. It moved out and away, and I watched as the sky closed beneath it. “God,” I heard someone say. “I bet that thing gets terrible gas mileage.”
I’m pretty sure seeing that rocket launch will stay with me for the rest of my life, as Korolev had said, but that claim still wasn’t enough to convince Yazdovsky. He remained committed to his current obligations, so Korolev took a number of evening walks with him in Moscow’s Petrovsko-Razumovskiy Park to talk him through the details. “He explained everything to me,” Yazdovsky said. “Then he took me to his design bureau, showed me around at the plant where rockets were being manufactured, and introduced me to his colleagues.” Korolev believed in pushing hard at the limits of things; pushing hard was how he lived his life. He told Yazdovsky that life wasn’t really life without risk, and that there was nothing more beautiful in the world than watching a rocket ascend into the sky. Korolev’s patient insistence paid off when Yazdovsky finally accepted the position. As a first step, Korolev directed Yazdovsky to speak with the man who was currently working on the project and could catch him up on what had been done so far. “I did as I had been told,” Yazdovsky said, “but found nothing except for a sheet of paper with an elaborate sketch of a dog drawn on it. I told Korolev that we would have to start from scratch.”
Careful, meticulous, and unswerving, Yazdovsky went to work developing a space dog training program. By the close of his long career, he had racked up an impressive list of honors and awards, among them the unofficial titles of “pioneer” and “founder” of Soviet space medicine and biology. It was Yazdovsky who selected and prepared the space dogs to fly, and it was Yazdovsky who carried the burden of responsibility when those dogs did not make it back.
The decision to work with dogs in the Soviet space program, as opposed to some other small animal (monkeys, rats, or even cats), grew out of Russia’s history of working with dogs in scientific research, made famous by physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) and his work in respondent conditioning. Biological rockets in the United States were carrying monkeys, and monkeys proved difficult to train and vulnerable to the stresses of spaceflight. They just weren’t very tough. Yazdovsky knew this because he had read books in translation written by Americans working on these flights. The books “proved very helpful,” Yazdovsky said, “since I could well appreciate what the Americans had been up against.” The Soviets knew dogs, and they knew how to work with them. Dogs are easy to train; akin to humans in their physiology and their emotional and physical reactions to stimuli; easy to care for; and easy and inexpensive to acquire. In order to put a man into space, Yazdovsky’s team would have to first study animals subjected to the conditions of spaceflight, and they were going to do it with dogs.
Yazdovsky went to work identifying the major challenges of spaceflight. It would be a tedious process, taking small steps only, inching ever forward. With each problem solved, new problems were uncovered. This is the way of science, the way of new technologies. “The machine,” writes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Wind, Sand, and Stars, “does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” If the Soviets were to put a man into space and do it safely, Yazdovsky determined, they would need to address three major challenges:
1. the conditions of near-Earth orbit, which includes the absence of oxygen, meteorites that might damage a spacecraft and its crew, cosmic and solar radiation, and extreme temperatures both hot and cold
2. spaceflight itself, which includes acceleration and the resulting g-forces, vibration, weightlessness, and noise
3. confinement in a small spacecraft, which includes isolation; bodily functions, especially eating, drinking, and elimination of waste; and psychological stresses
Soviet rockets in the early stages of development could not carry the heavy payloads of today, so space dogs had to be small, between thirteen and sixteen pounds. They had to be relatively young, between eighteen months and six years. And they had to be white, mostly white, or another suitably light color. A black-and-white video camera was installed in many of the spacecraft to gather visual data during flight, and white dogs were much easier to see in this footage. Finally, the dogs had to be female. A primary reason for this was waste collection. Flight suits were fitted with a waste collection system that functioned best when both solid and liquid waste exited the dog from the same basic location of the body. There was no equipment or room in a flight capsule allowing a male dog to lift his leg. Even so, a number of the sources I read refer to some of the space dogs as “him” or “he,” and some were given names more suitable for male dogs. A Russian friend and translator explained to me that in Russian one would always refer to a dog with a male name as “he,” regardless of its sex. So those dogs were female with male names, or some were in fact male. Indeed, a few sources report that a few male dogs did fly but only on suborbital flights. Other sources avoid using pronouns for the dogs altogether, preferring their names, possibly to avoid inaccuracies regarding sex.
When evaluating temperament, the dogs were sorted into three categories: even-tempered, anxious or restless, and inactive. Even-tempered dogs were generally the most successful in the training program, but a restless dog might become more even-tempered, or an inactive dog might come alive when given a job to do and a routine to do it in. The dogs eventually identified as suitable for flight were later sorted into rocket dogs qualified for short-duration suborbital flight and satellite dogs qualified for long-duration orbital flight.
Most of these small white female dogs were acquired at shelters in Moscow or directly from the city streets. “I went around with a tape measure and some tasty morsels,” said biologist Ludmilla Radkevich in the documentary Space Dogs. “For several days I drove around in a military car with a military driver through the outskirts of Moscow. If we saw a little dog running along, I’d jump out, measure it, and if it was small enough, pop it in the car. We collected about sixty dogs that way.”
The team preferred mixed-breed dogs, primarily for their hardiness. “We did not choose purebred dogs for the flights as they lacked the required resilience to the flight loads,” Yazdovsky said in Space Dogs. “Instead we picked mongrels which were more accustomed to extreme living conditions.” If a dog was alive and well on Moscow’s city streets, the thinking went, it could endure cold and other challenging weather conditions and isolation, and go without food for long periods of time. The streets of Moscow turned out to be the perfect environment for the making of a space dog.
The dogs’ health was primary to the success of their training and flight program and to the science, so important that Korolev himself made daily visits to the kennels to check on the dogs and on their caregivers’ efficiency and attention. He did not tolerate sloppy work. He loved the dogs and often picked them up and whirled them around in his arms. It was often overly warm inside the kennels, and the soldiers guarding the dogs were tasked with keeping their water bowls filled. As Korolev made his rounds one day, he found a few of the bowls empty. “Let’s get someone in here who cares about dogs,” he reportedly said, an
d sent the offending soldier to the brig. “It’s hard to believe that someone could love our dogs so much,” medical doctor Alexander Seryapin said in Space Dogs. “First thing every morning, [Korolev] went not to his office but to visit the dogs. He would check the temperature of their water. If the water was warm, he would give the lab technicians hell. ‘Why is their water warm? What have they been fed today?’ And every day after work without fail, [Korolev] dropped in to see how the dogs were doing.”
Once selected, training helped the dogs cope with the conditions of flight. While the dogs were not volunteers, a great deal of care was taken to put only the dogs that completed the training into rockets. The dogs trained to endure confinement for long periods of time (up to twenty days for long-duration flights), the noise and vibration of rocket flight, and a high-g environment followed by microgravity. The noise and vibration could be simulated by a vibration table. The dogs in training were secured to this table, Burgess and Dubbs write, and “the hapless animal would be shaken about, while the mechanism of the table created a loud and obviously frightening banging.” Sensors recorded blood pressure and heart rate, which rose dramatically during the vibration and noise but then returned to normal after the test. The g-force of rocket flight was simulated in a centrifuge, which spun the dogs in a circle on the end of a mechanical arm. While the acceleration of liquid-fueled rockets tops out at about 5g, the training pushed the dogs to a maximum of 10g. In a high-g environment, blood moves away from the brain, which can result in a loss of vision and consciousness. Even today, pilots and astronauts train in such centrifuges to build tolerance and familiarity with high g-force.
