But Medaris himself was not done sweating. Like Korolev nearly four months earlier, he too would now have a tense hour-and-a-half wait to see if Explorer had built up enough momentum to stay in orbit. Only when tracking stations on the West Coast picked up its signal after a complete revolution would he know for certain if the satellite was truly in orbit. “I’m out of coffee and running low on cigarettes,” Army Secretary Brucker impatiently wired good-humoredly from Washington. “Send out for more and sweat it out with us,” Medaris replied.
Von Braun, meanwhile, had taken out his own slide rule, calculating the estimated time Explorer would cross into signal range of Goldstone, the big tracking station in Earthquake Valley, California. It would take 106 minutes, he announced, at 12:41 AM.
At 12:40, William Pickering, the JPL chief responsible for Juno’s upper stages, could no longer contain himself. “Do you hear her?” he asked the Moonwatch station in San Diego. “No, sir,” came the reply.
“Do you hear her now?” he demanded two minutes later. Again, negative. “Why the hell don’t you hear anything?” Pickering had lost his cool.
By now, everyone at the Pentagon and the Cape was becoming seriously concerned. Three, four, and then five minutes passed. Messages were sent to every station on the West Coast. Anything? Nothing. Explorer was now eight minutes overdue. Satellites simply weren’t late. They were governed by immutable laws. Something must have gone wrong.
“Wernher,” Secretary Brucker’s tone turned suddenly icy, “what’s happened?” Von Braun, for once, was at a loss for words. Just then, a message clattered off the Teletype. “They hear her, they hear her,” a jubilant Pickering shouted. It was the Earthquake Valley station. “Goldstone has the bird!”
The United States of America had just entered the space age.
EPILOGUE
When told that Explorer was in orbit, Nikita Khrushchev reportedly shrugged. The race, he well knew, would no longer be so one-sided, now that a sleeping giant had been roused; and for the Soviet Union, it would be a contest of diminishing returns. But it did not matter.
Moscow had already scored its biggest gains by the time Juno soared into space, and those all-important early victories could never be pushed aside. In the eyes of the world, Sputnik made the Soviet Union a genuine superpower and America’s equal, and this new status would persist regardless of whose future rockets flew farther, faster, or higher. The triumph was psychological and irreversible, and would endure until the Soviet Union itself disappeared into the dustbin of history one wintry day in 1991. Then, just as swiftly, Moscow’s international image would revert to its pre-Sputnik reputation as a brutish and backward land.
Russia’s dominance of the space race did not peak in 1958. Moscow was able to hold its lead for another three years, culminating with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s ride into orbit atop an R-7 on April 12, 1961. But by then the element of surprise was gone. America had learned not to underestimate its Communist adversary, and Washington had embarked on its own ambitious and long-term space program. The shock value was therefore not the same as with Sputnik, though the historical significance of Gagarin’s flight was probably far greater and did indeed resonate throughout the rest of the world, particularly in developing countries.
The Soviet Union and Khrushchev, however, paid a steep military price for the early space triumphs. The R-7, for all its success as a heavy-lift vehicle and propaganda tool, was a failure as an ICBM. “It represented only a symbolic counter threat to the United States,” Khrushchev later conceded, and was “reliable neither as a defensive nor offensive weapon.” The very qualities that made it so adept at hurling large payloads into orbit rendered it almost useless as a fast-strike strategic weapon. It was just too big and unwieldy for war. It couldn’t be hidden in silos, moved on mobile launchers, or adequately protected. It took too long to fuel, and the huge infrastructure it required made too inviting a target. Khrushchev exaggerated somewhat when he boasted that his factories would roll out R-7s like sausages. In the end, only seven were ever deployed, and only four launchpads were built capable of handling the mammoth missile, which meant that Moscow could realistically depend on getting off only four shots in a first-strike scenario. If the United States attacked first, only one or two of the big missiles might be fired in time. Or possibly none. Whichever the case, the R-7 would not keep America at bay. As a security shield, it was a failure.
Ultimately, the R-7 cost Russia its missile lead because Moscow had to go back to the drawing board to develop an entirely new ICBM. In that regard, Korolev’s ploy to distract Khrushchev from the R-7’s failings by launching satellites worked all too well. By the time the Soviet leader fully realized that he did not have a reliable intercontinental rocket, the United States was pumping billions of dollars into its neglected missile programs because of the Sputnik scare, rapidly making up the lost ground. Khrushchev’s bluff ended up backfiring. When Dwight Eisenhower left office in January 1961, the United States had 160 operational Atlas ICBMs and nearly one hundred Thor and Jupiter IRBMs stationed in Europe to Moscow’s meager reserve of four vulnerable R-7s. Ironically, the additional Jupiters that were produced to mollify Lyndon Johnson and the jittery American public after the Sputnik scare now haunted Washington. “It would have been better to dump them in the sea than dump them on our allies,” Ike later commented. But the need to find a home for the superfluous missiles preoccupied Washington, exasperating superpower tensions. Great Britain had the Thors, which could hit only the Warsaw Pact countries and the westernmost parts of European Russia. But no frontline NATO allies wanted the Jupiters. In the end, Italy and Turkey reluctantly agreed to accept them in late 1959, and since they were geographically closer to Soviet borders, the Kremlin reacted furiously. “How would you like it if we had bases in Mexico and Canada?” fumed Khrushchev, angrily denouncing the deployment.
Tensions escalated further still, six months later, on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 was finally shot down over Soviet territory. Eisenhower, who was playing golf that day, as he had on the day of the very first U-2 mission four years earlier, would initially deny the incident, presuming that the pilot was dead and that the fragile aircraft had disintegrated, leaving little incriminating evidence. But as the Soviets kept pressing the issue, on May 5 the State Department would be forced to concede that a “civilian pilot of a weather-research plane” had indeed experienced problems with his oxygen supply over Turkey. “It is entirely possible that having a failure in the oxygen equipment, which would result in the pilot losing consciousness,” the statement coyly reasoned, “the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.” A few days later, Washington would be further forced to eat its words when a beaming Khrushchev produced the CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers and the U-2’s intact spy gear at an international press conference.
The incident caught Eisenhower in the devastatingly embarrassing lie that he had long predicted and feared, and spelled the end of manned reconnaissance flights into Russia. But just a few months later, on the same day that a Moscow court convicted Francis Gary Powers of spying, a new era of robotic, outer-space espionage began. On August 19, 1960, Richard Bissell’s spy satellite successfully jettisoned its first batch of photographs of Soviet territory. Corona’s film canister reentered the atmosphere off the shores of Hawaii, deployed its parachute, and was snagged in midair at 8,500 feet by grappling hooks attached to the front of a C-119 military plane.
And yet Bissell’s triumph would be short-lived, as he was undone by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the following year. Begun under Eisenhower and executed under the new Kennedy administration, the botched attempt to topple the Cuban president Fidel Castro would prove even more embarrassing than the U-2 shoot-down. As the failed mission’s architect and primary planner, Bissell—along with his patron and boss, Allen Dulles—would be forced out by the newly elected president, who would soon find himself baptized by rocket fire and international crisis.
“Those friggin missiles,” as John F. Kennedy derisively referred to the Jupiters, finally caused Khrushchev to snap when they became operational in Turkey in late 1961. From their Turkish bases, they could hit military installations in the heart of the Soviet Union, effectively restoring the very same strategic imbalance that had prompted Moscow to build rockets in the first place. The net result was the Cuban missile crisis.
As it turned out, it would be a U-2, and not the top-secret Corona, that snapped the incriminating photographs of Soviet launchpad preparations on Castro’s island that would spark the most dangerous showdown of the cold war. For Khrushchev, the attempt to station intermediate-range rockets on Cuban soil in the autumn of 1962 was a desperate gambit to redress the R-7’s shortcomings. By placing smaller missiles within striking distance of America’s shores, he sought to buy time for Yangel’s R-16 to finish trials and go into mass production. The Soviet military, by then, had long switched its allegiance from Korolev’s R-7 to rival missile designs, but the R-16 had suffered a series of developmental setbacks, including a catastrophic explosion of Glushko’s acid propellant that claimed the lives of Marshal Nedelin and 112 other Soviet rocket scientists in 1960, when Nedelin disregarded Glushko’s advice and ordered repairs performed on a fully fueled missile without draining it first. Only after the R-16 was fully ready, Khrushchev reasoned, would the balance of power be restored and security reestablished. To achieve that balance, he would risk confrontation. But in Cuba, Khrushchev made the wrong bet, and it would cost him the throne.
In the missile crisis it was Khrushchev who blinked first, promising to withdraw the IRBMs from Cuba. And even though Kennedy secretly agreed to remove the offending Jupiters from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet pullback, Khrushchev’s days were numbered. In that sense, the R-7 was the vehicle through which Khrushchev’s career soared and sank. Sputnik’s glory cemented his grip on power. But when the R-7 proved a battlefield bust, and the missile foray into Cuba turned into a humiliating retreat, the resulting political wounds proved equally fatal. Rumblings of discontent started almost immediately in the Presidium. In 1963 they grew louder and bolder as Khrushchev’s position further weakened due to his disastrous agricultural experiments. The ambitious farming reforms he had stubbornly rammed through the reluctant Presidium in 1957—the cultivation of millions of acres of “virgin lands” in Siberia and central Asia and the tripling of livestock quotas to overtake the United States in meat and dairy production—had completely collapsed. Not only were the thin-soiled Siberian fields ill suited for annual planting, but the quota system for increased meat and milk supplies served only to bankrupt many collective farms. To meet Khrushchev’s unrealistic norms, wily farm bosses used funds allocated for machinery and buildings to buy cattle on the sly and then resold the animals to government agencies at a third of the price. The purchase and upkeep of tractors and combine harvesters were sacrificed for the paper gains, and the charade lasted just long enough to devastate the countryside. Far from overtaking the United States, as Khrushchev had boldly boasted in 1957, by early 1964 the gap had actually widened in America’s favor. So poor were the harvests that the Soviet Union faced food shortages and, for the first time since the Second World War, rationing restrictions. Retail prices at official food stores rose 50 percent that year, many times more on the thriving black market, prompting protests from ordinary citizens and calls from indignant Central Committee factions for Khrushchev to answer for his “adventurism and irresponsibility.”
In October 1964, while Khrushchev was vacationing at his dacha on the Black Sea, the decision was made to oust him. In the Central Committee, 197 of the 200 full members supported the secret vote of no confidence, selecting Leonid Brezhnev as first secretary in his place. Given a generous pension, a small staff, and the use of a large apartment and dacha, Khrushchev lived out his retirement peacefully. The virtually illiterate peasant who freed the Soviet Union from Stalin’s terror and turned the USSR into an unlikely beacon of technological progress was the first leader in Russian history not to have died or been murdered in office. His son, Sergei, fulfilled his father’s dream of earning a doctorate and became a rocket scientist. Eventually, he moved to America, where today he is a senior fellow at Brown University.
Under Brezhnev, cosmic conquests would lose priority and momentum in the Soviet Union. Moscow still aimed for the moon, the ultimate bragging ground, but the effort did not have the same intensity or urgency as the post-Sputnik rush to paint the heavens Red. Focus steadily shifted toward military missile expenditures, as funds dried up and the economic crisis that the CIA had long predicted worsened. In addition to its agricultural woes, Soviet industrial growth began to slow dramatically in the mid-1960s, actually contracting in many cases, and resources became increasingly scarce. With the milestones in the space race growing ever more ambitious and costly, the Kremlin’s cautious new bosses preferred to spend on security rather than prestige.
In 1965, for the first time since its inception, OKB-1, Sergei Korolev’s design bureau, began suffering budget shortfalls and cutbacks. The Chief Designer’s star also began to fade. Khrushchev, his devoted patron, was gone, and Brezhnev did not have the same obsessive commitment to upstaging the Americans. Other missile makers were on the rise, landing big military orders, while Korolev’s giant new Lunar rocket, the N-1, was mired in technical and financial problems. What’s more, his quarreling with the imperious Valentin Glushko over the type of fuel to use on the 400-foot-tall N-1 had reached a point where the two were no longer on speaking terms, and not even Khrushchev could reconcile their differences. “I did everything I could to patch up their friendship,” the Soviet leader recalled, “but my efforts were in vain.” Worse, for the hypercompetitive Korolev, the United States was making very real strides with its proposed equivalent to N-1, the Saturn, and by the mid-1960s the Americans were poised to overtake him.
It was perhaps fortunate that Korolev died when he did, on January 11, 1966, before things began to unravel in earnest. Officially, the cause of death was complications during routine surgery to remove a tumor from his intestinal tract. But his colleagues said he worked himself to death. Korolev’s heart gave out during the operation. It had always been weak and had grown weaker in the last few years of his life, forcing frequent hospital stays. In the end, the gulag and the relentless pressure that he imposed on himself finally took their toll. The hard-driving Chief Designer was fifty-nine years old.
Buried in the Kremlin wall near Lenin’s tomb with all the pomp and ceremony of a national hero, Korolev was at last accorded the recognition he so richly deserved. He never realized his dream of putting a man on the moon, and as a weapon maker his most lasting contribution to the world’s arsenals would not be the R-7, but the R-11, originally a small submarine-launched rocket whose land-based version would become more commonly known as the Scud. His enduring legacy, however, would be as a space pioneer, as the man who in total anonymity made America tremble. Had he lived another five years, perhaps history would have been rewritten; perhaps the hammer and sickle would have flown first on the moon, instead of the stars and stripes. But then again, the tide seemed to have turned by then, and it is not clear whether even the tenacious Chief Designer could have rescued the faltering Soviet space program. One will never know. What is certain is that Russia’s moon dreams died with Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
His influence on the United States, however, persists to this day. NASA, the institution created in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 as a direct response to Sputnik, landed a man on the moon, created the space shuttle, and is now probing farther and deeper into the cosmos. Millions of American students still benefit from the college loan programs started under the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which also revamped elementary and high school curricula with an emphasis on science and foreign languages to better compete with Soviet engineers. The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 created the advanced military research agency that developed the Internet and
countless other inventions that have transformed the daily lives of Americans.
Politically, Korolev and Khrushchev cast an equally long shadow across the United States. Without the “Sputnik Congress,” and the Preparedness hearings that gave him such national exposure, Lyndon Johnson might not have won a spot on the 1960 Democratic ticket and ultimately may never have become president. NASA and the educational and military reforms of 1958 were all the creations of Johnson’s hearings, and the perceptions of the “missile gap” that he first raised became a central issue in the 1960 election, not to mention a costly mainstay of defense expenditures for decades to come. Stuart Symington beat the missile gap drums almost as loudly and alarmingly as Johnson, but in the end this consummate cold warrior’s presidential hopes withered because he refused to endorse escalating America’s involvement in Vietnam. In the 1960s, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the CIA’s covert activities in Indochina. Vietnam, he predicted, would prove an inescapable quagmire and ultimately a losing proposition. For his prescience, Symington was castigated as weak and soft on communism, and his career never recovered.
Red Moon Rising Page 33
