Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  All at once, the room burst into a chorus of competing protests. In the hue and cry, the smiles vanished, Glushko suddenly sneered, and voices were raised. “This proposal was a big surprise,” General K. V. Gerchik, the Tyura-Tam deputy base commander, recalled decades later. “There were objections.”

  Rather heated objections, according to the sparse historical record, which, in typical Soviet fashion, whitewashed the unseemly bickering in bland bureaucratic terms. Apparently Korolev’s fellow commission members had seen through his transparent ploy to distract Khrushchev from the warhead reentry problems by orbiting a satellite instead, and they wanted no part of the scheme. For their own reasons, the different factions on the commission rallied against Korolev’s rush to orbit. There wasn’t time, Glushko and the other design bureau heads objected, reminding the Chief Designer that the string of test failures had depleted the available stock of R-7s. They simply didn’t have the component parts to build more rockets to keep pace with Korolev’s frenetic schedule.

  The six military representatives on the commission complained that a satellite was a waste of time and resources. The R-7 was a weapon, not a toy for silly scientific competitions. “All these space projects will simply distract us from the main objective of a nuclear ICBM,” said General Aleksander Mrykin, reiterating the military’s long-held position. “We should delay the development of a satellite until the R-7 is fully operational.”

  Major General Oleg Shishkin, the nuclear ordnance chief, was particularly irate. It was his dummy warheads that were being incinerated by the faulty thermal shields, and until Korolev fixed the problem he couldn’t risk testing the R-7 with a live weapon. General Ivan Bulychev, the deputy communications commander, had equally pressing and practical reasons to oppose the satellite. It was Bulychev’s ground stations that would need to be reconfigured to track a completely new orbital trajectory, and the impatient Chief Designer wanted the upgrades ready by early October—an unrealistic time frame. Colonel Yuri Mozzhorin recalled, “The Directorate of Missile Weapons was sharply against the participation of the Ministry of Defense in the tracking of satellites… because it would harm the defensive capabilities of the country.”

  Korolev had anticipated such rumblings from the armed forces. Soldiers were inherently conservative, and every major modern military innovation from the Gatling gun to the aircraft had been viewed with extreme skepticism by general staffs. Khrushchev had foisted missiles on his reluctant generals, had taken billions of rubles from their budgets to finance his gamble, and now the scheming Korolev was trying to bamboozle them with this sudden urgency to orbit a man-made moon. To deflect the criticism, the Chief Designer had already petitioned the government to issue a decree ordering his subordinate design bureaus to begin “development of an artificial satellite for photographing the earth’s surface.” Like von Braun three years earlier, he had hoped that the potential military applications of spacecraft as targeting and espionage vehicles would generate enthusiasm.

  But the military men were unmoved. The Soviet Union did not have the same urgent need for aerial reconnaissance as the United States. America was a far more open society, ridiculously easy to penetrate. Its Congress publicly debated minute details of defense budgets. Astonishingly accurate road maps that would be highly classified in the USSR were sold at every gas station. Security was so incredibly lax that Korolev had been able to read a translation of U.S. newspaper accounts of Atlas’s latest test, a fiery failure off the Florida coast, and of the successful recovery of a nose cone Wernher von Braun had blasted into space with his Jupiter C. Von Braun, conversely, did not even know that Korolev existed—a fact that apparently grated on the egotistical Chief Designer. For the Soviets, it was mind-boggling how much information the Americans naively left lying around for the KGB to scoop up. Russia’s generals didn’t need a satellite to find out what was going on in Washington. They needed a missile that could destroy it.

  Korolev’s satellite surprise had also encountered resistance from another, entirely unexpected quarter: from Mstislav Keldysh, a legend in the ranks of Soviet academia, who had been awarded three Hero of Soviet Labor gold stars, the USSR’s equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Korolev’s junior by four years, Keldysh was a handsome Latvian mathematical genius, a child prodigy both as a theoretician and as an applied aviation engineer, who had been the youngest member ever elected to the prestigious Academy of Sciences. In Soviet scholarly circles, Keldysh’s name carried the same awe-inspiring weight as that of Albert Einstein or Enrico Fermi. The suave Balt, a master at bureaucratic maneuvering, had used his status and unique position as the Presidium’s science adviser to become the USSR’s earliest advocate of space exploration. Long before Korolev’s breakthrough with the R-5 intermediate-range missile, it had been Keldysh’s political clout that had nudged the satellite proposal gradually up the government ladder.

  But now the man who had once been Korolev’s greatest proponent was openly skeptical. This flimsy “simple satellite” that Korolev wanted to launch was nothing more than a political stunt, Keldysh complained. They should wait until Object OD-1, the mammoth orbiting laboratory bristling with sophisticated sensors, was ready. That way the Soviet Union could score a real scientific coup. Object OD-1 would perform invaluable research such as measuring the density, pressure, and ion composition of the atmosphere at altitudes from 200 to 500 kilometers (124 to 310 miles). It would measure magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and the corpuscular radiation of the sun. Ultraviolet and X-ray spectrums, inherent electric charges, and positive ion concentrations could be determined—in short, everything scientists needed to know before attempting to send a living being into space. The PS-1 Simple Satellite that Korolev now proposed launching instead was so small that the only real task it could perform was to send short bursts of a low-frequency signal back to amateur ham radio operators on earth. As a research tool, it had no real value.

  Keldysh now charged that Korolev was more interested in the personal prestige of breaking the space barrier than in the collective data the mission would bring back. This was all about the Chief Designer’s ego, not the advancement of science, and he would be damned if he was going to tie up the Soviet Union’s most powerful computer for Korolev’s little vanity project. Russia had virtually no computers in 1957 because Stalin had viewed cybernetics as a “faulty science,” not applicable to a dialectical society. By the time the military applications of the machines had become obvious, the USSR lagged hopelessly behind the West, and Keldysh, as the head of the Steklov Institute of Applied Mathematics, controlled access to the only civilian supercomputer in Moscow.

  Without access to Keldysh’s computer, Korolev would be stopped in his tracks because it could take months using manual six-digit trigonometry tables just to plug in all the variables needed to plot the parameters of an orbital trajectory. His engineers needed to calculate the exact speed of the rotation of the earth at the point of launch, which, at Tyura-Tam, was just over 1,000 feet per second. The direction of the launch, the azimuth, had to be factored in, since the earth rotates on a west-to-east axis and launching westward would be like swimming against a tide. The precise shape of the earth at the point of launch also had to be measured, since the planet is not a perfect sphere. The inclination of the equatorial plane, the angle between the equator and the azimuth, then needed to be calibrated to determine fuel load, which in turn affected the mass-to-thrust ratio critical to calculating the “escape velocity” that would propel PS-1 beyond the pull of gravity. This in turn determined the apogee and perigee—that is, the peaks and troughs of the satellite’s wavelike orbit—along with the duration of each revolution. These variables were all mercilessly interrelated, and the smallest mistake could result in the satellite crashing back to earth or escaping into deep space, never to be seen again. Even if PS-1 were catapulted to its proper celestial position, a tiny error in trajectory computations could result in a widely errant elliptical orbit that would either bypass the Unite
d States or appear over the North American continent at the wrong times. That, for Korolev, would spell disaster, because he wanted his little satellite seen in the night sky over enemy territory. It was why he had ordered PS-1 made entirely of a highly reflective aluminum material, polished to a mirrorlike sheen, and why he had gone to such lengths to insist on a spherical shape. Korolev had shot down the cone, the cylinder, the square, and every design his frustrated satellite makers had proposed. “Why, Sergei Pavlovich?” one of them finally asked, exasperated. “Because it’s not round,” he had replied mysteriously.

  There was no real mystery, however. Spinning spherical objects simply caught the light better, and PS-1 would act like a bright mirror for the sun’s rays as it circled the earth, making it much more visible in the dark. Without this form of optical amplification, PS-1, at twenty-two inches in diameter, was too small to be seen from distances of up to 500 miles away. And seeing, as the old saying went, was believing.

  The same psychological reasoning applied to Korolev’s decision to sacrifice scientific instrumentation in favor of audio capability. Virtually all of PS-l’s 184-pound mass was consumed by two transmitters and their three batteries. The silver-zinc chargers alone weighed 122 pounds, providing power for only a few weeks of operation. As a redundancy, they operated two identical one-watt transmitters that broadcast alternatively on different frequencies using separate pairs of ten- and eight-foot antennae. This way if one system failed, a signal would still reach earth. Hearing was also believing.

  Sights and sounds from space would give even a crude little craft like PS-1 enormous propaganda and political value, Korolev argued. No one would be able to deny its existence, and even the “simple satellite” would be a Soviet triumph over the Americans, orbiting proof of the supremacy of Communist countries. “The Soviet Union must be first,” he said adamantly. Korolev’s colleagues, though, were far from convinced. “The Army needs just one thing,” Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin shot back, “a rocket that will work.” The standoff continued, with Korolev demanding that the commission accept his proposal.

  Glushko and the military men led the revolt—the Red Army representatives because it was a distraction from solving the nose cone problem, Glushko perhaps as a way of getting even with his rival. Whichever the case, all the old animosity had bubbled to the surface: the fights, “using the dirtiest language and crudest phrases,” the tirades that had left so many wounded feelings. “Mindless malice,” Korolev complained to Nina.

  Smarting from the rejection, Korolev stormed out of the conference room, no doubt leaving his own habitual trail of expletives that Soviet historians opted not to record for posterity. He was back two weeks later, early in the second week of September, once again insisting that his Simple Satellite Number One be given the green light. This time, however, his position had improved, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The R-7 had completed another nearly flawless test flight on September 7, using up the last of the original batch of rockets, and except for the persistent nose cone meltdowns he now had back-to-back successes to offset the three failures and months of catastrophic delays. Parts for another rocket were already being shipped to Tyura-Tam from Moscow, so he had the hardware. Once more, Korolev also had Khrushchev firmly in his corner, and his benefactor, after outwitting the hard-line coup plotters, now sat alone atop the Soviet hierarchy as the undisputed master of the Kremlin.

  For Khrushchev, the R-7’s second consecutive success had also been a vindication of his vision for a new defense shield against the forces of imperialism. If the Soviet leader harbored any regrets with regard to the R-7, it was the disappointing reaction in the West to his announcement of the new weapons system. Washington had not quaked in panic at news of the Communist ICBM, as Khrushchev had hoped. In fact, the American general public barely noticed, and the Eisenhower administration appeared dismissively skeptical as to whether the R-7 was truly operational. There was a pervasive sentiment in Washington that a totalitarian state with communal toilets could not pull off something so technologically complex, as Senator Ellender had stated. A similarly derisive disbelief had greeted the initial news in 1949 that Moscow had detonated an atomic bomb. “Do you know when Russia will build the bomb? Never,” Truman had scoffed. When presented with incontrovertible evidence that the Soviets had indeed split the atom, Truman responded, “German scientists in Russia did it—probably something like that.” Even after the USSR had further narrowed the atomic gap with a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in 1953, Moscow was still the butt of American jokes. Russia couldn’t possibly smuggle a suitcase bomb into the United States, went one popular punch line, because the Soviets hadn’t yet perfected the suitcase.

  Such perceived slights drove Khrushchev to push his scientists harder to prove the critics in Washington wrong. But Korolev did not want to dwell on the time-consuming setbacks of the reentry problem. In the months required to completely redesign the warhead shield, momentum would be lost. Meanwhile, he had a rocket on its way to Tyura-Tam, and a record waiting to be broken. The Americans were surely not sitting idly by as the clock wound down on the International Geophysical Year. Korolev decided to turn the screws up a notch on his cautious fellow commission members. “I propose,” he said airily, “that we put the question of the national priority of launching the world’s first satellite to the Presidium. Let them settle the matter.”

  There was, of course, no “them” in the Presidium any longer. By September 1957 the Communist Party’s ruling body was Khrushchev’s personal rubber stamp. The dissenting voices were all gone, replaced by loyalists like the fainthearted but trustworthy Brezhnev, and newcomers like Andrei Gromyko, who replaced the turncoat Shepilov as foreign minister and was scheduled to travel to Washington in the first week of October to meet John Foster Dulles for the first time. The mutineers had been dealt with—though not in the customary Stalinist fashion that they had so ardently supported. In a testament to Khrushchev’s reform of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not a single conspirator was shot or even arrested. Molotov was dispatched to Outer Mongolia, to serve out his sentence as the Soviet ambassador in dusty Ulan Bator. Kaganovich was appointed director of a remote potassium mine in the Perm province of the Ural Mountains. Malenkov was sent to manage the Ust-Kamenogorsk electric power station on the equally desolate Irtysh River in Kazakhstan, while Shepilov was dispatched to Kyrgyzstan to teach central Asian children the tenets of Marxist-Leninism. They were effectively banished into internal exile, but they would live out their natural lives.

  Korolev’s gambit had its desired effect. Opposition to the substitute satellite melted away almost as quickly as it had welled up at the previous meeting. The military men sat silent, and Glushko lowered his eyes in defeat. He may not have shared his rival’s dreams of space conquest, but he certainly did not want to be the nail that stuck out. “Nobody wanted to be accused of dragging their feet,” General Gerchik recalled, in the event that the United States did launch first and Khrushchev later came looking for answers and scapegoats. One after another, the commission members meekly raised their hands. The final decision was unanimous.

  The only outstanding question, the launch date, was settled at the next meeting. On September 23, the same day as the Little Rock riot that spurred Eisenhower to action, the commission formally informed the Kremlin that PS-1 was scheduled for liftoff on October 6, 1957. It was official. The “Iron King,” as the petrified staff at OKB-1 sometimes called Korolev, had won. The stubborn Chief Designer had finally gotten his shot at space.

  • • •

  Liftoff was scheduled for 10:20 PM on Sunday, the sixth of October, under the cover of darkness because American spy planes roamed the skies during the day. It also turned out that the late hour was ideal for PS-1 to attain its desired orbit. The launch itself would be strictly secret in case it failed, and Korolev took every precaution to ensure that Washington did not get wind of his intentions. In the huge assembly hangar not too far from the spartan little house t
he Chief Designer kept at Tyura-Tam, the R-7 lay prone on a train-sized dolly, its copper-clad exhaust nozzles burnished to a bright orange under its flared white skirt. It was model number 8k71PS, sixteen feet shorter than its predecessors, and technicians in surgical smocks were tinkering with the final modifications to its smaller, stubbier nose cone. The alterations gave the now ninety-six-foot rocket a stouter, more matronly look, but PS-1, Tikhonravov’s tiny prostreishy sputnik, or “simplest satellite,” did not require the same large and elongated thermal shield as a five-ton thermonuclear warhead that would reenter the searing atmosphere. The warhead’s cumbersome radio-guidance targeting system had also been removed, shaving another four feet off the final package, since it too was no longer necessary. The satellite, after all, was not being aimed at an American city; with luck, it would never touch solid ground again. To achieve orbital velocity, Glushko’s central sustainer core engine was being recalibrated to fire until it ran out of fuel, rather than to cut off at a predetermined point along a ballistic trajectory, and a new, more potent mix of hydrogen peroxide was being introduced to drive its turbo pumps faster.