Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Red Moon Rising

  Matthew Brzezinski

  On October 4 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union secretly launched Sputnik, the Earth’s first ever artificial moon. No bigger than a basketball, this tiny satellite was powered by a car battery. Yet for all its simplicity, Sputnik transformed science fiction into reality, passing over the stunned American continent once every 101 minutes and propelling the USSR from backward totalitarian regime to cutting-edge superpower and pioneer of the Space Age. The United States, desperate to catch up, trailed the Soviets into the space race the following year, with a controversial space programme masterminded by former Nazi rocket scientists.

  Red Moon Rising tells for the first time the full story of this real-life historical thriller and its colourful cast of characters. There is Sergei Korolev, Russian rocket designer and literally toothless survivor of Stalin’s purges, whose identity remained secret until his death in 1966; Mihail Tikhonravov, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking space visionary who would eventually become a Soviet spymaster; Wernher von Braun, Nazi bomb maker turned American space prophet; and President Eisenhower, relaxing on the golf course whilst the USSR lays claim to the skies, a reaction to be echoed eerily in 2001 by the presidential behaviour following 9/11. Containing many parallels with today’s political landscape, this is the fascinating story of one of the greatest scientific and psychological coups of the twentieth century, and a pulse-racing account of a time when two nations and ideologies were pitted against each other in a quest that laid the foundations of the modern technological world.

  Matthew Brzezinski

  RED MOON RISING

  Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age

  To Lena,

  who wants to be a scientist

  and do “science stuff”

  FOR THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF SPUTNIK, THE BEHIND-THE-SCENES STORY OF THE FIERCE BATTLES ON EARTH THAT LAUNCHED THE SUPERPOWERS INTO SPACE

  THE SPY PLANES WERE DRIVING NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV MAD. Whenever America wanted to peer inside the Soviet Union, it launched a U-2, which flew too high to be shot down. But Sergei Korolev, Russia’s chief rocket designer, had a solution: an artificial satellite that would orbit the earth and cross American skies at will. On October 4, 1957, the launch of Korolev’s satellite, Sputnik, stunned the world.

  In Red Moon Rising, Matthew Brzezinski takes us inside the Kremlin, the White House, secret military facilities, deep-cover safe houses, and the halls of Congress to bring to life the Russians and Americans who feared and distrusted their compatriots at least as much as their superpower rivals. Drawing on original interviews and new documentary sources from both sides of the Cold War divide, he shows how Khrushchev and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower were buffeted by crises of their own creation, leaving the door open to ambitious politicians and scientists to squabble over the heavens and the earth. It is a story rich in the paranoia of the time, and the combatants include two future presidents, survivors of the gulag, corporate chieftains, rehabilitated Nazis, and a general who won the day by refusing to follow orders.

  Sputnik set in motion events that led not only to the moon landing but also to cell phones, federally guaranteed student loans, and the wireless Internet. The true story of the birth of the space age has never been told in such dramatic detail, and Red Moon Rising brings it vividly and memorably to life.

  PROLOGUE

  September 8, 1944

  The rocket rose slowly, tentatively at first, as if reluctant to break from its earthly moorings. Three full seconds elapsed before its tail fins finally cleared the mobile gantry crane that had held it upright.

  But now that it was free of its tethers, it seemed to lose self-doubt. Already it felt lighter, stronger. It had consumed nearly 1,000 pounds of propellant to travel those difficult first fifty feet, and the laws of physics were kicking in. Every second from now on meant 275 fewer pounds of spent fuel and oxidizer to carry. Momentum was entering the equation, increasingly on the rocket’s side. Now it took only a fraction of a second to ascend the next fifty feet; even less to climb the fifty after that.

  The worst was over. The heaviest lifting behind, the rocket seemed to settle down; the shaking and shuddering eased, the strain on its structure and systems diminished. It was building off its own forward progress, climbing higher and higher. Beneath it, the clearing in the forest from where it had been launched began to recede from view. Soon the firing site’s fuel tankers, transport trailers, sixteen-ton Strabo crane, and armor-plated command-and-control trucks disappeared underneath the canopy of Dutch pines.

  The rocket gained speed, rising at 500, 600, and then 700 feet per second. Below, lights from the nearby horse-track oval outside suburban Wassenaar emerged in the evening dusk. Moments later, the glow from the larger city of The Hague filled the panorama. Still, the rocket climbed higher over the Dutch coast, maintaining an exact ninety-degree ascent to prevent its fragile aluminum fuel bladders from bursting. To save weight, they had been designed with a thin skin that could support the rocket’s 18,948 pounds of propellant only in the vertical position. Any pitch or roll at this stage and the shifting fuel would rupture the holding tanks and explode.

  The rocket needed time to lose weight. And so it stayed on its upward course, its trajectory traced by a billowy white vapor trail as its 580- horsepower hydrogen-peroxide steam turbine pumped fuel through 3,184 injection ports into the combustion chamber. There, an electric igniter, a spinning wheel of spark plugs, set fire to the misty mix of ethyl alcohol and liquid oxygen, producing a vein of jet exhaust gases at 4,802 degrees Fahrenheit. That superheated exhaust—exiting through a narrow nozzle and sprayed with an alcohol propellant to increase thrust—pushed the rocket ever faster. Its rate of ascent was now 1,100 feet per second, its altitude two miles.

  Far below, the 117-member firing crew of the second battery of the 485 th Artillery Battalion under the command of SS Gruppenführer Hans Kammler suddenly heard a sound like the cracking of a giant whip. They knew without looking up that their rocket had just broken the sound barrier. And it was still accelerating, outrunning its own blast wave.

  Twenty-five seconds had elapsed since liftoff. During that period, the rocket had shed six thousand pounds. The temperature of the sheet metal covering parts of its outer skin had spiked from 297 degrees below zero Fahrenheit at the time of fueling to over 300 degrees. The stress on its steel rib cage and interior framing had increased to nearly four times the force of gravity. But most important, its two delicate fuel bladders had drained by more than a third, allowing it to safely begin maneuvering.

  At last the rocket was truly free. As if emboldened by its liberation from a strictly upward trajectory, it gained even more speed and altitude as it rolled gracefully on its axis, veered west, and bowed its long, tapered body in a forty-five-degree inclination. Ten miles below, the Dutch coastline retreated from view, giving way to the inky blackness of the North Sea. The rocket was now traveling at twice the speed of sound, still climbing. Vanes in its four tail fins adjusted trim, pitch, and yaw, aided by heat-resistant graphite rudders that directed the flow of its white-hot exhaust gases. The steering mechanisms were in turn guided by a gyroscopic platform fitted beneath the nose cone. This inertial navigation system—the world’s first—was the rocket’s brain, the genius that separated it from all other pretenders. The gimbaled spinning wheels, rotating at 2,000 revolutions per minute, pointed in the same direction no matter where the rocket moved. Accelerometers attached to gimbals read the rocket’s rotations relative to the rigid platform, telling it exactly where it was heading and what course to steer. But though the rocket had freedom of motion, it did not have free will. Its gyros were preset, its trajectory preordained by a compl
ex set of mathematical equations.

  Now, those calculations told it to reduce its trim, to increase its inclination to forty-nine degrees. It did so with the flick of a fin, a tiny twist of the rudder. The new bearing proved an easier angle of ascent, allowing it to go faster still. As thousands more pounds of propellant burned off, the rocket’s thrust-to-weight ratio, so adverse at liftoff, grew increasingly favorable. Now that its motor was no longer pushing such a heavy load, it could really let loose, plowing forward at 3,335 miles an hour.

  Fifteen miles above sea level, the rocket entered the upper layers of the atmosphere, where combustion engines normally suffocate in the thin air. But it breathed easily because it carried its own supply of liquid oxygen. The negative G forces generated by its sustained acceleration now generated eight times the pull of gravity, compressing its nose and ribs. Soon, its skin began to itch from atmospheric friction, heating in places to 500 degrees. But it felt light as a butterfly: it had dropped 17,000 of its original 27,000 pounds and was moving a mile a second.

  Sixty-three seconds into its flight, the rocket ceased being a rocket. At an altitude of seventeen miles, the turbine shut down, cutting off fuel to the combustion chamber. Now the rocket was a projectile, a forty-six-foot-long artillery shell painted in a jagged camouflage scheme of signal white, earth gray, and olive green. Although no longer under power, the rocket still rose, moving at 3,500 miles per hour. The laws of physics that had gotten it this far would see it through the final leg of the journey. It broke the twenty-mile and then the thirty-mile barrier, and continued to climb. Another ten seconds passed, and the rocket reached its apogee of fifty-two miles. It was now brushing against the void of outer space.

  Slowly, imperceptibly at first, its tail began to dip. It still hurtled forward at nearly five times the speed of sound, but it was now losing altitude and velocity, and its stabilizer fins had no grip as it tumbled backward toward earth. The tug-of-war between the forces of momentum and gravity had begun.

  The time was 6:41 PM, a Friday. In London, fifty miles below and eighty miles to the west, the evening rush hour was just waning. Traffic was not heavy, owing to gasoline rationing, and the city was settling down to supper. Lights flickered from apartment windows and homes; the blackouts that had been in effect during the air raids were no longer rigorously enforced now that the Royal Air Force had repelled the Luftwaffe and claimed control of the skies. In central London, an American radio reporter by the name of Edward R. Murrow prepared his evening broadcast. In Chiswick, in the western suburbs, six-year-old John Clarke was freshening up for dinner in the upstairs bathroom of his family’s brick town house. His three-year-old sister, Rosemary Ann, was playing in her bedroom down the hall. Both children were in good spirits. After all, there was no school tomorrow.

  Over the North Sea, the rocket was now in freefall, plunging tailfirst at a rate of 3,400 feet per second. As it descended into the thicker atmosphere, its fins began regaining traction and slowly the rocket righted itself. The aerodynamic friction that permitted its stabilizers to regain their function now began to wreak havoc on its rapidly heating shell. The nose cone glowed faintly as the temperature of the quarterinch-thick sheet metal that encased it rose to 1,100 degrees. The frictional drag increased as the rocket descended into the lower, denser atmosphere and approached the British coastline. It shot over Ipswich and Southend-on-Sea, pivoting slightly, so that the jagged edges of its camouflage pattern twirled in a grayish-green blur. Other than its protective paintwork, and a seven-digit serial number, the rocket bore no identifying markings. To its creator, the brilliant engineering prodigy Wernher von Braun, it was known as the A-4. To the Nazi High Command it was the Vergeltungswaffen-2, the new Vengeance Weapon that would restore the balance of power in the air campaign. The British would come to know it as the V-2, the world’s first ballistic missile.

  Now in the final moments of its four-minute flight, the V-2’s target area sprawled out beneath it in every direction. The rocket was blind. Its navigation system had stopped working at the seventeenth-mile point of its journey, where it had been hurled on a predetermined trajectory. But the V-2 was an imprecise aiming device; where exactly within a ten-mile radius the missile would land was a matter of geographic chance. The East End, the City, and the Tower of London whirled past. The western part of the British capital magnified into view. The rocket’s target range grew narrower. A neighborhood, Chiswick, now loomed ahead. Its red-tile roofs and cobblestone streets approached at three times the speed of sound. But no one heard the V-2 coming. Its sonic boom, that shrill thundering crack that sounded like a nearby lightning strike, hadn’t caught up to it yet.

  Silently, the V-2 slammed into Staveley Road at Mach 3, gouging a crater thirty feet long and eight feet deep. A millisecond after impact, its 1,627 pounds of high explosives, a pink, puffy mixture of ammonium nitrate and Amatol, detonated.

  The explosion and ensuing sonic boom deafened John Clarke. His parents’ house, and the homes of six of their neighbors, crumbled around him. The bedroom walls parted and fell away. Floors imploded in heaps of dust and plaster. Bricks and wood splinters crashed through windows like shrapnel. Furniture flew. Ceilings collapsed. Hallways caved in. And all this occurred in an eerily noiseless vacuum. “The best way to describe it is television with the sound off,” Clarke told the BBC sixty years later.

  When the mushroom cloud over Staveley Road dissipated, Clarke saw that the bedroom where his sister had been playing stood intact. Miraculously, his sister also seemed unharmed. “There wasn’t a mark on Rosemary,” he recalled. He shook her, but she didn’t respond. The blast wave had collapsed her little lungs. She had died where she sat.

  Two minutes later, another V-2 struck North London, killing six more people. That night, Edward R. Murrow informed his American listeners of a new German weapon that rained “death from the stratosphere.”

  “German science,” he predicted in a subsequent broadcast in November, after 168 people perished when a Woolworth department store suffered a direct V-2 hit, “has once again demonstrated a malignant ingenuity which is not likely to be forgotten when it comes time to establish control over German scientific and industrial research.”

  • • •

  The war was over—at least in the technology corridor of Adlershof, just outside Berlin. Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s tanks and the First Ukrainian Red Army Group had rolled through the industrial suburb several days earlier, on April 26, 1945, and the fighting had been brief. Artillery still echoed from the not-too-distant German capital, where the Führer had gone to ground in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, but in Adlershof residents were already clearing debris from streets, filling in the bomb craters along Rudower Chausse, and carting away glass from shattered storefronts. There was a sense of relief and resignation throughout the town, as if its inhabitants had already made peace with a new era and master.

  Boris Chertok had no trouble finding the big brown brick building. It was exactly where Soviet military intelligence said it would be. Downshifting his commandeered gray Mercedes, Chertok pulled up to the entrance. The main gate had been ripped off its hinges, and a body lay slumped near a twisted bicycle stand. But otherwise the research center seemed undamaged. Cautiously, Chertok made his way inside. He was nervous. Berlin’s new masters were still jumpy, unnerved by the perplexing sight of ordinary Germans calmly tending their lawns and rose gardens as Soviet T-34 tanks clattered past their homes to blast the Reichstag.

  Unholstering his pistol, Chertok stepped into the darkened complex. Everything was intact: equipment, safes, precision tools, files with test results, and all manner of documents and blueprints, many stamped SECRET or TOP SECRET. Even the keys to the gleaming white laboratories had been left behind—obligingly numbered, in neat orderly rows. Chertok stowed the gun. He barely knew how to use it anyway. The sidearm, like his ill-fitting uniform, was a new and uncomfortable acquisition, a recent addition to his wardrobe that left him feeling like an imposter. The
bars and gold star on his shoulder boards identified him as a major in the Red Army, but the military garb would not have fooled a seasoned veteran. The tunic was too clean, the boots too unscuffed for a frontline officer. What’s more, not a single combat decoration hung from Chertok’s breast, a highly suspect omission after four years of all-out war. Major Chertok, it was clear, was only masquerading as a soldier. In reality he was a thirty-three-year-old electrical engineer with a prematurely receding hairline, the slight paunch of someone who spends too much time behind a desk, and a dossier identifying him as an employee of NII-1, the Soviet Union’s leading rocket research agency. Hundreds of civilian specialists just like him were pouring into Germany, arriving daily in a motley assortment of Dodges, Studebakers, and converted Boston B-25 bombers that the United States had given the Soviet Union under the lend-lease program. And they were coming—as Edward R. Murrow had prophesied—to claim the intellectual spoils of war, to seize upon Nazi Germany’s “malignant ingenuity.”

  The research institute in Adlershof was just one in a burgeoning catalog of places of scientific interest in the Berlin area. There was the Askania factory nearby, the Siemens plant in Spandau, a design bureau in Mariendorf, another Askania facility in Friedenau, a Telefunken factory in Zehlendorf, and the list went on. Each of these sites held its own wonders: magnetron tubes with a pulse power of up to one hundred kilowatts, accelerometer calibrators, polarized relays, transverse and longitudinal acceleration integrators—precision instruments that the Russians had only dreamed of. It was such sophisticated components that made the world of difference between the giant, guided V-2 and the crude little directionless Katyushkas the Soviet Union had built during the war. And Joseph Stalin wanted that technological edge.