by Jamie Doran
Academician Mtislav Keldysh was one of the Chief Designer’s most powerful allies, consistently supportive of new space missions and scientific experiments in orbit. He was an expert in the mathematics of missile and rocket trajectories, and had established a power base in Moscow centred on his huge custom-built computing facility. Like Korolev, he possessed indispensable skills, with political cunning to match. While Korolev built the rockets, Keldysh plotted the routes they would fly.
The most irritating problem for Korolev was that he still had to rely on the Red Army’s unintelligent cooperation during space launches, because his work with rockets and missiles was so intimately linked with military areas. He could subvert military equipment to his own ends, but he could not make the jealous generals vanish. However, if one of them blocked him, he was quite unafraid to treat the man as an inferior. A senior engineer in Korolev’s bureau, Oleg Ivanovsky, recalls, ‘On one occasion a very high-ranking commander refused access to an important radio communications link during a space flight. Korolev spoke to him on an open phone line and shouted, “You don’t know how to do your job! Give me the link, or I’ll have you demoted to sergeant!” We were amazed that he could be so insolent to a superior.’
First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues in the Politburo could be very supportive towards Korolev when it suited them, although they were not particularly concerned with the subtleties of space hardware. Rocket technology fascinated them more for its glamour and potential political impact than for its hard engineering details. When Korolev’s primary missile and rocket development programme began in 1955, he asked senior members of the Politburo to inspect his work, as Khrushchev recalls in his memoirs:
Korolev came to a Politburo meeting to report on his work. I don’t want to exaggerate but I’d say we gawked at what he had to show us, as if we were a bunch of sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. Korolev took us on a tour of the launching pad and tried to explain to us how the rocket worked. We didn’t believe it could fly. We were like peasants in a market place, walking around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough.4
Korolev’s colleague Sergei Belotserkovsky (responsible for the cosmonauts’ academic studies) sums up the Politburo’s stance on space affairs. ‘The top people’s attitude to Korolev was purely that of consumers. For as long as he was indispensable, for as long as they needed him to develop missiles as a shield for the Motherland, he was allowed to do whatever was necessary, but the manned space research had to follow on the back of the military work. The point is that Korolev launched his cosmonauts on the very same missiles.’
His principal workhorse was the dual-purpose R-7 missile-space launcher, or ‘Semyorka’ (‘Little Seven’), as it was affectionately known by the men who built it or flew on it. Fuelled with liquid oxygen and kerosene, and incorporating four drop-away side-slung boosters, this was the world’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Each stage or ‘block’ of the vehicle was fitted with one of Glushko’s four-chamber engines. It has to be said that Glushko’s engines were superb – in fact, they are still in use today in the upgraded R-7 rockets that carry modern Soyuz capsules to the orbiting Mir space station. Glushko’s innovation was to design compact fuel pumps and pipework to service four combustion chambers simultaneously. The apparent thrust of twenty separate engines on the R-7 is, in fact, delivered by five.
The first two launches of the R-7 failed, but on August 3, 1957, it flew successfully in a simulated ICBM trajectory, then began its career as a space launcher just two months later, on October 4, by launching ‘Sputnik’, the world’s first artificial satellite.
Andy Aldrin is full of admiration for the speed with which Korolev could conjure up his space triumphs. ‘He and his merry band of rocket engineers tried to go off on a vacation after Sputnik, and they’d rested for about two days when Korolev got a call from Khrushchev. “Comrade, we need you to come to the Kremlin.” Of course he went, and he sat down with the Soviet leadership, and they said, “In a month we have the Fortieth Anniversary of the glorious October Socialist Revolution. We want you to put up another satellite that will do something important.” They proposed a satellite that could broadcast the “Communist Internationale” from space, but Korolev had another idea. He wanted to put a live animal in the satellite, so that he could lay the groundwork for an eventual manned mission; and within a month, from scratch, he and his people completed the spacecraft and launched it.’
Sputnik II went up on November 3, carrying the dog Laika. This was a clear indication of where the Soviet space effort was heading. ‘Americans were shocked by Sputnik, and then Laika. This dark, mysterious, backward country on the other side of the world, that was considered to be thoroughly nasty, had jumped ahead of them.’
A small American rocket at last carried their first satellite, ‘Explorer I’, into orbit on January 31, 1958. Khrushchev disparaged it as ‘a grapefruit’ because it weighed only 14 kg against Sputnik’s 80 kg and Sputnik II’s 500 kg – although Explorer I immediately made one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century when Dr Van Allen’s simple instruments detected radiation belts around the earth.5
When it came to selecting candidates for the manned space programme in the autumn of 1959, Korolev looked at all the most promising personal files, but it was not until June 18, 1960 that he summoned the twenty successful applicants to OKB-1 in Kaliningrad to see an actual spaceship. (The hardware had not been anywhere near completion until that time.) Alexei Leonov remembers the Chief Designer introducing himself with a little speech designed to put the cosmonauts at ease. ‘He said, “What we’re doing is really the easiest thing in the world. We invent something, find the right people to build it properly, and place lots of orders for components with the best and most experienced factories all around the country. When they at last deliver what we’ve ordered, all we have to do is put the pieces together. It’s not very complicated.” Of course we knew there was more than this to the building of a spaceship.’ But the cosmonauts were touched by Korolev’s warmth and friendliness. ‘My little eagles’ he called them.
According to Leonov, Yuri Gagarin made a good impression in Korolev’s office that day, listening intently and asking pertinent questions about space and rockets. In this formal semi-military context – young recruits being introduced to a superior for the first time – Gagarin’s curiosity might easily have been misread for impertinence, but the Chief Designer was pleased that any of the cosmonauts should ask direct questions. Leonov remembers, ‘He told Yuri to stand up, and he said, “Tell me, my little eagle, about your life and your family.” For ten or twenty minutes it was as if Korolev forgot about the rest of us, and I think he liked Yuri immediately.’
Gherman Titov, a somewhat prideful man, was not cowed by the Chief Designer’s reputation and authoritarian demeanour. ‘What did I know, a young lieutenant with eyes full of courage and scarcely a single sensible thought in my head,’ he admits ruefully. Over the coming months and years his relationship with Korolev never really developed into genuine warmth. ‘Probably, two lions couldn’t exist in the same cage. I don’t want to say I was ever the same calibre of lion as Korolev, but we did have quite a difficult relationship.’
It was Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov who emerged as firm favourites to be taken under the Chief Designer’s wing, although he would prove fiercely loyal and protective towards all the cosmonauts who flew for him and put their trust in his rockets and capsules.
After this first introduction Korolev escorted the cosmonauts into the heart of OKB-1. They went into the main construction area, while Korolev and one of his senior spacecraft designers, Oleg Ivanovsky, started to explain what they were seeing, but it was hard to take things in. There were a dozen spacecraft, lined up neatly, their positions in the rank depending on their current state of construction, from bare shell at one end to near-completion at the other. Archive footage still conveys the extraor
dinary scene. Each ship consisted of a silvery sphere mounted on top of a conical base covered in wires and pipes, with another reversed cone beneath it, clad in delicately grooved metal vanes. The double-cone section was a detachable equipment module, and the vanes on the lower cone were radiators. The big spheres (everybody called them ‘balls’) were cabins for the crew.6 The machines had no aerodynamics, no control surfaces or any obvious means of propulsion; no proper landing gear, even. They could not stand on the floor properly, but had to be supported inside metal frames to keep them upright, like unstable buildings propped up with scaffolding. ‘It was something we couldn’t grasp at all,’ says Titov, ‘It was completely incomprehensible to us – a ball without wings, without anything. It wasn’t easy for a pilot to understand. Of course, as pilots, we’d never come across anything to compare it with.’
These were ‘Vostok’ space capsules.
There were bundles of electrical wires running from various test boxes and conduits in the factory that snaked across the floor, sprouted from the walls, dropped from the ceiling. Every last one of them plugged, like sinister roots, into the space machines, testing and probing, powering them up, shutting them down, as the white-coated engineers ran their countless tests.
Oleg Ivanovsky, who had a reputation for being long-winded, lectured the cosmonauts in mind-numbing detail about the ship’s components. ‘They dragged a few words out of me, as they say.’ All the while, he scanned the faces of the twenty would-be cosmonauts before him; twenty young men, twenty names, twenty strangers. Korolev knew them by now, of course, but Ivanovsky had not met any of them until this moment. ‘They all gazed at the vessels with great curiosity, as this was the first time they’d seen any space technology. I knew they were all pilots, familiar with aviation, but one has to say honestly: which of them could get used to this new apparatus?’
Korolev cut short Ivanovsky’s lecture and explained Vostok’s flight characteristics in terms that his audience of MiG-trained pilots could more easily understand, but he warned his listeners, ‘There’s a lot you have to learn. We can’t tell you everything in one day. We’ll prepare special classes, so that you can learn the system thoroughly. You’ll attend lectures, and then we will set you some exams.’
One of them, a handsome lad with an irresistible grin, asked Korolev a question. ‘Sergei Pavlovich, will you be marking us?’
‘Yes, and we’ll throw you out!’ Korolev barked at him. ‘Stop smiling! What are you smiling at, Yuri Alexeyevich!’
Korolev glared at the boy to see how he would react, perhaps deliberately trying to undo the mood he had created back in his office. Gagarin forced the muscles of his face into a sober expression, but he was not at all frightened. He stayed perfectly calm, and almost certainly this was the response which Korolev was looking for. Ivanovsky had discovered this from personal experience. Just a few weeks previously Korolev had thrown a fit and sacked him on the spot. He often sacked people, then reinstated them the next morning. It was his way of letting off steam. On this occasion he yelled across the assembly floor, ‘You no longer work for me, and I’m putting a de-merit in your record!’ Ivanovsky shouted back, ‘You can’t do that, because you just fired me. I don’t work for you any more!’ Korolev shouted at him again, but in a short while the incident was forgotten. The Chief Designer admired people who stood up to him – people who played straight, and did not hide important problems under the table simply in order to protect their jobs. His relationship with Ivanovsky was very trusting after that. And now, here was this cocksure farmboy from the Smolensk Region . . .
Suddenly Korolev invited the cosmonauts to take a closer look at one of the Vostoks, a version to be used in ground tests, but fitted just the same with most of the equipment used during an actual flight, including the ejection seat and control panels. Alexei Leonov remembers Korolev telling them to take off their boots (to preserve the ship’s cleanliness), then go up a ladder and climb through the open hatch of the ball. Without a moment’s hesitation Gagarin stepped forward. ‘With your permission, Sergei Pavlovich?’ He sloughed off his boots and clambered up.
One of the other cosmonauts, Valery Bykovsky, insists that Gagarin was not actually told to remove his boots. After all, a pilot would not expect to take off his footwear to sit in the cockpit of a new MiG, so why now? ‘That’s how they take off their shoes in Russian villages when they go into a house, as a sign of respect,’ Bykovsky thought to himself. He was sure that Gagarin became ‘the one’ from that moment.7
Gagarin paid no attention to his companions, all busily removing their shoes on the floor behind him. He was much too fascinated by the spacecraft cabin. It was swathed throughout in a light tan-coloured rubber foam. This cladding disguised the sphere’s real guts: the endless pipework and electrical distribution systems. It would be some weeks yet before any of the cosmonauts was introduced in more detail to these shrouded mysteries. For now, Gagarin’s quick inspection took in only the most obvious items. He would have found the interior much less cluttered than the cockpit of his MiG. Certainly there were fewer dials and instruments. The ejection seat, which he now reclined on, took up much of the space. This must have seemed reassuringly familiar, except that he had to lie on his back rather than sit upright. Mounted on the wall directly above his face was a simple panel with a few switches, some status indicator lights, a chronometer and a little globe representing the earth. To the casual observer it might have looked like a child’s educational toy, but in the months to come, Gagarin and his colleagues would learn about the hidden gyroscopes and accelerometers that fed their data into the globe, allowing it to swivel in precise lockstep with Vostok’s orbit, relaying to the pilot his position over the real planet earth. Other indicators on the panel counted off the orbits, and gave readings of the ship’s internal temperature, pressure, carbon dioxide, oxygen supply and radiation levels. The cosmonauts would discover that these displays were not necessarily intended directly for their benefit. They were supposed to scan the dials at intervals, then report various measurements to the ground by radio link. Others would decide what the readings meant, and what should be done with the ship.
To his left, Gagarin would have seen another small panel with four rows of toggle switches. Leonov says that he fiddled with some of them, understanding straight away that he could only get to these left-hand controls by reaching across with his right arm. The natural armchair-style arrangement of an aircraft cockpit obviously did not apply here, although his right hand in repose settled comfortably on a small lever, the nearest equivalent any Vostok crewman would find to the control joystick in a fighter plane. Higher up, on the right, there was a radio transceiver. The only other piece of equipment obviously accessible to him was a food locker. It did not seem to matter which hand one used to reach that.
Below and slightly forward of his feet, Gagarin would have seen a round porthole with elaborate calibrated markings. The ‘Vzor’ was an optical orientation device consisting of mirrors and lenses. Through this, the curvature of the earth’s horizon would appear greatly exaggerated. When Vostok was aligned at a particular angle relative to the ground, the pilot would see a brilliant circle of horizon all around the Vzor’s outer edge. This would indicate that the craft was properly positioned for its re-entry burn. The effect was rather akin to a distorting mirror at a fairground, adapted by ingenious but under-equipped engineers into a precision tool of space navigation.
The layout of this Vostok test cabin was not exactly the same as Gagarin would find aboard the actual flight version. In time he would encounter more equipment: for instance, an intrusive television camera that pointed directly at his face, and a bright lamp that shone uncomfortably into his eyes so that his every expression could be recorded for the doctors. And, on the left-hand switch panel, a numeric keypad – two rows of three numbers, six digits in all – whose purpose was not immediately clear to him or any of the cosmonauts who clambered into the cabin after him.
They called Gagarin ou
t after a few minutes. The other cosmonauts took their turns in the cabin, while Korolev and Ivanovsky leaned into the hatch to show them the controls.
Afterwards, while they were leaving the construction hall, the cosmonauts chattered eagerly about Vostok and who would be first to fly it. Alexei Leonov remembers putting his arm around Gagarin and saying, ‘Believe me, today could’ve been very important for you. I know you can be the first to go.’ Several in the group chimed in their agreement. Gagarin had made an impression back there.
Meanwhile Valya was beginning to understand the pitfalls of being a cosmonaut’s wife. As she told journalist Yaroslav Golovanov in 1978, ‘Yuri would often come home late, and he frequently went on trips to do with his work. He wasn’t very communicative about what he did, and if I ever showed any curiosity he would dismiss it with a joke. I know he wasn’t allowed to talk about these things even with his family, but it sometimes seemed to me that his work at Star City was taking him away from me more and more. I tried to make it seem that I hadn’t noticed, but from time to time I would be overcome by a strange anxiety.’8
One day towards the end of 1960 Gagarin brought some of his cosmonaut friends home, and Valya, coming in from work at the Star City clinic, overheard them whispering. ‘It’ll be soon now. Either Yuri or Gherman.’
4
PREPARATION
When Korolev and his colleagues brought home captured German V-2s and began to fire them, they built a small testing station 180 kilometres east of Volgograd (then called Stalingrad) near a small town called Kapustin Yar. In January 1957 work began on a much larger and more permanent base at Plesetsk, on the Arctic Circle, because trans-polar trajectories offered the shortest ballistic routes into the North American continent. Plesetsk became the principal base for Soviet intercontinental nuclear missiles – though the ‘missile gap’ which John F. Kennedy spoke of so effectively in his 1960 election campaign was largely a myth. Kennedy presented a frightening vision of vast numbers of Soviet missiles aimed at the US, and urged the building of an adequate counterstrike force to reduce the supposed ‘gap’ between Russian and US capability. In fact, at that time Plesetsk could handle no more than four of Korolev’s R-7 rockets at a time, and it is unlikely that they could have been launched all at once. The missile gap was, if anything, greatly in America’s favour.
