by Jay Chladek
Chelomei also developed a weapons delivery variation of this idea and called it the racketoplan (Russian for “rocket plane”), using his UR-200 ICBM as the launch vehicle. During ballistic reentry, the vehicle would release a payload of multiple cruise missiles with warheads that had the capability of striking targets in multiple locations with either conventional or nuclear armament. It was a very ambitious idea. If it were deployed operationally, many experts believe there would have been no defense against such a system. As ambitious as the kosmoplan and racketoplan designs were, though, Soviet leaders were reluctant to provide additional funding after the early design studies.
It was during this time that Chelomei first encountered the individual who became his greatest political adversary. That man was Dmitry Feodorovich Ustinov. Ustinov was an engineer who in the 1930s mainly specialized in weapons development. During the outbreak of World War II, Stalin appointed him the “people’s commissar of armaments.” Ustinov’s efforts were instrumental in the evacuation of the Soviet war factories from cities close to the front lines to east of the Ural Mountains, well out of range of German bombers. His management style and skills were considered very important to the war effort.
After the war, Ustinov’s efforts were instrumental in helping the Soviets to acquire German rocket technology, set up the infrastructure required to build copies of the V-2, and come up with an equivalent ballistic missile capability. He became a Central Committee member in 1952. When Stalin died the following year, the Ministries of Armaments and Aviation were combined into the Ministry of Defense Industry with Ustinov in charge. He was known as “Uncle Mitya” to the leaders of the design bureaus.
8. Minister Dmitry Ustinov would become Chelomei’s biggest political adversary.
In those days, Soviet rocketry was considered to be a form of artillery. Since Ustinov’s responsibility was more in line with ground armaments and artillery, he considered Chelomei’s aviation-based design bureau to be outside its area of expertise. What annoyed him most of all was Chelomei’s connection with Nikita Khrushchev, which allowed the designer to bypass the management chain of command if he wanted something, and Ustinov was powerless to do anything about it. Ustinov likely considered Chelomei to be a grandstander who had no respect for the minister’s authority. He also realized that while Chelomei’s designs were more advanced than the competition, the designs would also require more time and resources to develop, utilizing resources already stretched thin in the postwar Soviet economy.
Ustinov was also not in favor of having two design bureaus as prime hardware developers for the Soviet space program. He had already lost Korolev to the siren song of space travel and wasn’t about to lose a second designer to an activity the minister apparently considered to be wasteful, except for propaganda purposes. Granted, the Soviet space efforts required more than one design bureau, but such arrangements were similar to the American approach with one prime contractor (OKB-1) in charge and several subcontractors developing hardware such as rocket engines for them. Ustinov knew that subcontractor efforts usually didn’t consume as much manpower and resources as a primary contractor.
Proton
During the years that Nikita Khrushchev was in power, Chelomei had great success in having his designs approved and funded for study and development. This isn’t to say that everything was approved, but Chelomei at least seemed to have a higher rate of success than some of his contemporaries. Over time, his relationship with Ustinov worsened, but OKB-52’s leader had more than enough support to keep Ustinov in check.
With work far enough along on the UR-100 and the UR-200 ICBMs, Chelomei turned his attention toward designing a space station. In order to fly it, a new booster capable of lifting payloads more massive than what the R-7 could achieve was needed. Thus, work began on the UR-500. The UR-500, in keeping with Chelomei’s universal-rocket strategy, was first proposed as an ICBM capable of lofting a thirty-megaton hydrogen bomb. Its use as an ICBM was a dead end, though, as Khrushchev decided it was a bit too big and expensive to develop for that purpose. However, Chelomei was able to gain approval to begin its development as a space launcher. The UR-500’s early design approval occurred at a meeting of the Defense Council between Premier Khrushchev, representatives of the Soviet military, and the various design bureaus in February 1962. The design work proceeded quickly, and it was authorized for full hardware development by August 1964. Eventually it became a highly successful space launcher, known to the world by a name derived from its very first payload, Proton.
At the same 1962 meeting, Korolev submitted a proposal to develop his dream booster, the massive N1, with the goal of achieving a manned Soviet landing on the moon ahead of the United States. As initially pitched to Soviet leaders, the N1 was intended to launch a seventy-five-ton payload into Earth orbit. Korolev felt that the capability was sufficient for a spacecraft design intended to land one cosmonaut on the moon. The booster design was a monster in most every sense of the word. The first stage would be powered by twenty-six motors using liquid oxygen and kerosene. Soviet technology was not yet capable of creating rocket engines of the same size and power class as the F-1 engines used on America’s Saturn V, hence the need for many smaller motors.
Vladimir Chelomei was allowed to present his plans for the UR-500 the day before Korolev, as he did not feel well after an airplane journey to the meeting’s location. He felt he might be too ill to attend the next day, when the ballistic missile and space proposals would normally take place. Given this problem, Sergei Khrushchev sat in at the meeting as Chelomei’s representative when Korolev pitched the N1. Khrushchev was mainly there to relay to his boss what other programs were being proposed. As he later wrote in his book, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, the younger Khrushchev enthusiastically told Chelomei about Korolev’s N1 proposal that night. Chelomei thought for a moment and then responded, “I don’t think the N1 will fly.”
Surprised by this response, Khrushchev pressed his boss for more information as he questioned Chelomei’s skepticism about the design. While Chelomei didn’t go into specifics, he felt that synchronizing the thrust of twenty-four engines and dealing with the resultant vibrations and oscillations from them would be an impossible task. He concluded his points by saying, “The devil himself couldn’t bring it off.”
Reports suggest Vladimir Chelomei and Sergei Korolev got along well. They were very respectful of each other, although highly competitive behind the scenes. This contrasted greatly with Korolev’s attitude toward Valentin Glushko. Korolev believed it was comments from Glushko to Stalin and Beria that caused him to be arrested, tortured, and sent to a gulag in Siberia (later released to become a designer working for Glushko). Korolev usually never let his personal feelings get in the way of collaboration with Glushko’s bureau, as he needed their engines to power his R-7 rocket. Behind the scenes, however, their relationship was considered tumultuous at times. By comparison, Chelomei’s relationship with Glushko was a better one, as he also needed Glushko’s engine designs to power his own rockets. For the N1, Korolev selected a different design bureau to build the engines for the first stage.
While Korolev preferred using liquid oxygen and kerosene to power the N1, Chelomei and Glushko both favored the use of the hypergolic propellants unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine (UDMH) and nitrogen tetroxide. These were essentially the same fuels used in the U.S. Air Force’s Titan boosters. While the use of such fuels meant that the UR-500 would potentially not be as powerful as a booster fueled by LOX and kerosene, both Chelomei and Glushko felt that the advantages of this approach more than outweighed the disadvantages, thanks to the simplicity of the rocket engines used in the UR-500.
Where Korolev failed with the N1 and Chelomei succeeded with the UR-500 Proton was partly due to the approach each designer took toward engineering and testing. Korolev’s approach was the one he had successfully used on his rockets back before the R-7. The design was finalized, built, and then tested. As problems croppe
d up in testing, the design was modified until success was achieved. While this approach worked well with less complex machinery, for something as massive as the N1, with an astronomical number of possible failure points, the problems became almost insurmountable. The N1 design had major issues from the outset. As its size and weight grew, the first stage gained six more engines for a total of thirty motors powering the first stage. This increase in thrust also increased the complexity of the design, which in turn increased the weight factor. It was a vicious cycle to overcome.
Chelomei, on the other hand, favored developmental testing. Once a rocket’s specifications had been drawn up, hardware was built and tested to verify the soundness of the design, and any changes were made along the way. Many problems were resolved during testing, and the results were used in finalizing the hardware for the production vehicle. It was a design approach favored more in the United States, especially among aircraft corporations. The only drawback to this approach was that tangible results typically didn’t come quickly, and often there was no production hardware available until years after the project had begun. In the case of the UR-500 Proton, though, work proceeded as quickly as possible, and the first versions were ready for testing by 1965.
The Proton booster would become a true workhorse of Soviet space efforts. To the casual observer, the first stage of the rocket resembled a single core stage with six strap-on boosters attached in an arrangement similar to Korolev’s R-7, with its four boosters around a center core. In reality, those strap-on-like protrusions were integral to the core and contained the six first-stage motors. Chelomei’s team designed the first stage in this manner to cut down aerodynamic drag and also to make it easier to transport the subassemblies over road networks. The second stage used elements of the UR-200 design. In its original two-stage form, the UR-500 lofted a series of cosmic ray astronomy satellites known as the Proton series, which in turn gave the rocket its name. In a four-stage configuration, Proton also opened up access to geosynchronous orbit for communications satellites. Many years later, when the booster was offered to international commercial firms for their payloads, it became one of the most successful commercial launch boosters ever built, and Proton rockets continue to be used to this day. A three-stage version would also be developed to loft Chelomei’s next great idea.
Almaz
At the same February 1962 meeting in which the UR-500 and N1 rockets were approved for study, Vladimir Chelomei submitted another project proposal. This was for the Almaz (Russian for “Diamond”) space station. In the early 1960s, America’s unmanned Corona series of reconnaissance satellites were already orbiting over the Soviet Union, attempting to photograph regions of the country that aircraft could no longer access since the May 1960 downing of a U-2 spy plane. Indeed, the Soviets had been working on a similar satellite capability, yet they lagged behind the Americans.
9. Chelomei’s UR-500 Proton became a workhorse of heavy lift and is still used today. Courtesy NASA.
Almaz was conceived as a three-man space station, whose primary purpose was to gather intelligence on the West with the use of a large telescopic camera system and other reconnaissance equipment. Once in operation, the crew could aim the camera to focus on targets of interest during each ninety-minute orbit. They could shoot photographs, develop them, and then transmit those images back to the ground. Almaz received initial approval for early design work in 1962. The green light to fully develop it into an operational space station didn’t come about until early October 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev gave his full approval to the program.
Looking at the Almaz design from the side, it resembled a spacecraft with a pointed nose section; two stair-stepped cylindrical sections, with the fatter section in back; two solar arrays; and a rear docking port. A little over 11 meters in length and a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters for the rear cylindrical section, Almaz was larger than any other manned spacecraft the Soviets had built to that time. In this configuration, three cosmonauts would ride the nearly twenty-ton vehicle into orbit atop a Proton booster, in a VA (vozraschaemyi apparat, Russian for “return craft”) capsule bolted to the front of the space station. In keeping with Chelomei’s modular approach, the VA capsule was also planned for use on OKB-52’s LOK spacecraft, a vehicle being designed for a manned lunar-flyby mission. The capsule would act as an escape vehicle in the event that a problem occurred with the rocket during ascent. After achieving orbit, the crew transferred into the Almaz station via a hatch in the base of the capsule’s heat shield, like the Gemini-B spacecraft intended for the MOL. At mission’s end, the crew would return to Earth in the VA capsule. Externally, the VA resembled a slightly smaller version of an Apollo capsule. A long section on the front of the capsule, which superficially resembled a launch escape tower, contained the orbital maneuvering thrusters and the retro-rockets for deorbit and reentry. Each capsule was designed to be refurbished and flown on up to ten missions.
Cosmonauts would occupy the stepped-cylinder main body of the Almaz. Located in the smaller diameter section was a bedding area, seats, exercise equipment, a lavatory, and a small galley with a table for meals and drinks to be prepared. The three cosmonauts would man the station in rotating shifts of eight hours each around the clock. One crewmember would rest while the second manned the sensor equipment. The third crewmember would assist the second one during breaks from exercises needed to combat the long-term effects of weightlessness. The larger body housed the cameras and sensors for the photography of targets of interest on Earth. The largest of this equipment was the two-ton reconnaissance camera and telescope system code-named Agat-1 (Russian for “Agate,” a semiprecious stone). Behind the main body were two solar arrays for electrical power generation and a docking port for other spacecraft.
From a workstation in the front of the main body, located between the Agat-1 camera system at the rear and the smaller living section at the front, a cosmonaut could monitor the reconnaissance sensors and view what the camera saw. With tracking systems built into the camera, it could hold focus on a target on the ground or ocean. This was not an easy task to accomplish since an orbiting spacecraft would only be within view of a target for maybe a minute or two at most, depending on whether the target was directly under the spacecraft or off to one side.
The camera’s viewfinder could survey an area as large as one hundred kilometers, but by looking at a panoramic display screen on the control console, the cosmonaut operator could zoom in and focus on an area as tight as one hundred meters. According to Vladimir Polyachenko, head designer of the Almaz at OKB-52, when he was interviewed for Nova’s “Astrospies” television program on PBS, “We could see details that were half a meter long from 250 kilometers [away] in outer space. For example, we could see the make of the car, if it’s a Ford or Toyota.” Some Western analysts with knowledge of Almaz have speculated that its camera’s resolution was even greater than that, possibly approaching the MOL KH-10’s three-inch resolution. But MOL’s camera was housed in a much larger area than where the Agat system was contained, meaning the KH-10 likely had a higher magnification capability.
The Almaz was designed so it could fix on a target on the ground long enough to shoot a picture of interest and cancel out the motion blur of the spacecraft. Once the image was taken, development of the film could take place on orbit for further analysis. If the cosmonauts photographed anything of immediate interest, the images could be transmitted to the ground via a video camera. The minimum time needed to shoot a photo, develop the film, and transmit the image back to the ground in this manner was about thirty minutes.
10. The Almaz system was Chelomei’s answer to the MOL. Courtesy of the author.
Almaz was also equipped with its own defense system. The Soviets were very concerned that an American spacecraft might be sent up to intercept and rendezvous with the Almaz, perhaps attempt to board the craft, or at worst try to destroy it. To combat this perceived threat, a proposal was drawn up to mount a Nudelman-Rikhter 23 mm automatic cannon
(the same type used in aircraft such as the MiG-15) on Almaz. The cannon system was mounted in a fixed position on the belly of the station, in line with its longitudinal axis. In order to aim the cannon, the entire station had to be rotated. Once the target was acquired visually through a periscope, the cannon could be fired by the Almaz crew or remotely from the ground to deliver a devastating blow to any intruding spacecraft.
While the Almaz station’s configuration superficially resembled the MOL design, it isn’t entirely known if its configuration was derived from the MOL or if it was designed totally independent of that program. During the “Astrospies” interview, when asked about how much the Soviets knew about the MOL, Polyachenko replied, “We had some information about the MOL program from open and closed channels. We had our sources.”
One essential difference between the two programs was that while MOL was designed for thirty-day missions and intended to deorbit for burn up after the crew departed in the Gemini capsule, the Almaz was planned to remain in a parking orbit awaiting the next crew. A new three-person crew and supplies would come from the TKS (transportnyi korabl snabzheniia, Russian for “transport supply ship”) spacecraft, a vehicle almost as big as the Almaz. Like Almaz, the TKS needed a Proton booster to reach orbit. The TKS was almost a self-supporting space station itself, fully intended to be more than just a ferry vehicle. The forward section comprised a VA capsule, complete with a hatch in the base of the heat shield like the one launched on the Almaz. Behind the capsule, in the FGB (a Russian acronym meaning “functional cargo block”) section were contained additional fuel tanks, supplies, solar panels, and other equipment deemed necessary for additional Almaz missions.
